ICS Commemorates: Earth Day 2018

​Earth Day 2018 is an urgent call to End Plastic Pollution
​for the survival of our Planet.

Migratory seabirds have limited choices of nesting sites. Photo Richard Jeanne

​Each year over 300 million tons of fossil fuel-based plastic is sold, and over 90% of it Is thrown away almost immediately.  It doesn’t break down into compost like vegetable scraps or natural materials such as wood, stone or glass. Our Earth is now literally drowning in plastics – littering our oceans, our rivers, our beaches, landscapes and landfills with rubbish, accumulating into rubbish islands and rubbish mountains.  Plastics are injuring and poisoning our wildlife and our bodies, releasing toxins capable of disrupting human hormones and linked to disease and environmental degradation.

Regular cleanups always yield too much litter on our beaches. Photo ICS Silhouette

​Seychelles is progressing in its efforts to reduce plastic pollution, with a ban on single-use plastic bags introduced in 2017 and highly visible campaigns emerging to ban straws and other single-use plastics.  Momentum is also building to abandon non-recyclable products. Young Seychelles NGO The Ocean Project Seychelles host monthly beach clean ups on the main populated islands and concerned citizens conduct their own Pick It Up campaigns.

Pristine wildlife islands such as Farquhar also fall victim to global plastic pollution and marine debris washed ashore. Photo Aurelie Duhec

​ICS Conservation Teams on Seychelles Islands contribute by conducting frequent beach clean ups, weighing and categorizing the collected debris.  This remit is enabled under the GOS UNDP GEF Outer Islands Project.  The results of these collections indicate that much of the plastic pollution washed in Seychelles waters comes from much further afield, from Indonesia to Africa across the Indian Ocean. Most populous on the beaches are plastic bottles and caps, buoys and flipflops, the plastic bag waste being broken down into microparticles by wave action and ingestion by marine life, much to their detriment.

This issue is truly global, and we as custodians of Planet Earth need a concerted and collaborated effort to reduce plastic pollution before it swamps our planet.  We all, as individuals, need to take personal responsibility to refuse, reuse, reduce and recycle our “stuff” – for the health and survival of Earth as a whole. 
And we can lobby governments and corporations to make the same changes on a larger scale.  For more information on what You can do right now, click here.