Santiago, March 30, 2021 . An impressive animated video accounts for the large amount of single-use plastics that are generated as waste in places that sell food in Chile, which was prepared based on the conclusions of a study carried out by Oceana and Plastic Oceans Chile .
“The idea of carrying out this report was to calculate the environmental benefit that the bill will have once it is approved, and because we detected that at the country level there was very little information in this regard. This allowed us to calculate that only in premises that sell food, consumed 23,240 tons of single-use plastics in one year, “said Javiera Calisto, Director of Oceana’s Marine Pollution Campaign.” We can put an immediate stop to this situation if the Chamber approves the bill and thus stop the plastic pollution most found on beaches and oceans and that we now know represents a large amount ”, he added.
The report establishes that the more than 23 thousand tons of single-use plastics used in restaurants, bars, cafes and delivery in the country, are equivalent to the weight of 116 blue whales or the volume of five Olympic swimming pools or the carbon footprint that one a person in a car would stop turning the Earth 5,300 times, among other comparisons.
Bill
The report is released just before the Chamber of Deputies and Deputies votes the bill that regulates single-use plastics, which was entered by a cross – sectional group of senators and with the support of Deputy Catalina Pérez and the deputies Luis Rocafull and Sebastián Torrealba. The proposal, prepared from a report by Oceana and Plastic Oceans Chile , seeks to ban single-use plastics used in establishments that sell food and beverages, and which are the most found on beaches and seas.
After going through the review of the Senate Environment Committee chaired by Senator Girardi, the bill was approved unanimously in the chamber in July 2020 and dispatched to the lower house.
“We are very little away from taking a transcendental step for the environmental care of Chile and the world. The planet cannot keep waiting, if we do not take action today in 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in the sea. Single-use plastics have a slow degradation that causes tremendous environmental damage, that is why it is so important that this project is approved and we hope that it has a high level of support ”, said deputy Catalina Pérez.
For his part, the deputy Sebastián Torrealba, member of the Lower House Environment Committee, said that “there is a transversal support to approve this project, which has been prepared taking as an example those places that stand out for their legislation in environmental issues and thus position Chile as an example in regulating single-use plastics ”.
Last week, under the presidency of deputy Ricardo Celis, the Environment Commission of the Chamber of Deputies and Deputies completed the review of the project, which must be voted on by the chamber.
“We wanted to speed up the processing of the project with the conviction that a solid project was dispatched thanks to the work we did in the Commission and the contributions of the different deputies,” said Celis. “We would all like more ambitious projects, but the bills should be possible to carry out and here there is an important effort to regulate plastic bottles in delivery even in supermarkets,” he added.
For her part, the Minister of the Environment, Carolina Schmidt, was optimistic, noting that “we are very close to Chile achieving a new milestone in its environmental history: today the project that eliminates single-use plastics will be voted on. If approved, we will go one step further to have a new law that combats pollution from the indiscriminate use of plastics. This effort, added to the law that banned plastic bags, will allow us to advance in the cultural change that we need for a cleaner and more sustainable Chile ”.
If voted favorably, the bill would be sent to the Senate for final review and then become law.