It doesn’t seem five minutes ago when we were crying our way through David Attenborough’s Blue Planet 2. All that plastic in the seas, killing all those beautiful creatures. Society changed, wanted to recycle more; to stop poisoning the oceans. Then, along came COVID-19 and I sense we’re all going backwards again.
Suddenly, out of necessity, we’ve gone back to our parents’ generation, where almost everything was thrown away, burnt or chucked in landfill. Little things, like our weekly shopping delivery where we used to return all our plastic bags to the driver, we now keep them. We might need to build an additional garden shed to store them all at this rate. But there’s more than this.
I welcome the fact that, finally, the government seems to have got its act together in the provision of PPEs for health and care staff. So, I looked at the government’s own instructions as to its use and it wasn’t good. Tons of the stuff is destroyed after using it once and unless I am much mistaken, it can’t be recycled, not least because it could be full of COVID-19.
Similarly, those protection masks people are wearing. I’d imagine they are for one use only, although experience has shown me that some people wear the same one over and over again. Again, these must go to landfill.
I understand it, of course. This is a horrible virus and we can’t take chances. I just fear that everything we learned from Blue Planet 2 we have forgotten.
