The Town Hall's plastic cutlery
by Brian Bamford
Council Leader Councillor Allen Brett
ON January 25th, this year, on the back of all the publicity about plastics in the environment the Rochdale Council leader declared his intention to make Rochdale one of the first single use plastic-free (SUP-free) boroughs in the country.
Yesterday, visitors to the Christmas Fair in Rochdale Town Hall may have been surprised to find that their meals were being served with plastic knives and folks.
And this was in the week that a dead sperm whale* was washed ashore in eastern Indonesia had consumed a horrifying
collection of plastic trash, including 115 drinking cups, 25 plastic
bags, plastic bottles, two flip-flops and a bag containing more than
1,000 pieces of string. In total, the plastic contents of the whale’s stomach weighed some 13.2 pound (six kilograms).
The rotting carcass of the 31-foot (9.5-meter) whale was last found Monday
in shallow waters just off Kapota Island in the Wakatobi National Park,
according to news reports.
I'm told by people who were at the Rochdale Town Hall special 'Xmas Do' that the cups available were plastic coated as well. Thus the sperm whale in Indonesia won't have had chance to gourge itself on the this debre.
It seems that Indonesia, with a population of 263 million people and 34,000 miles (54,716 kilometers) of coastline, ranked second, behind China, on a list of the top 20 worst polluters of plastic trash to the world’s ocean, according to a 2015 study that found 192 coastal countries contribute a combined total of 8.5 million tons of plastic waste to the oceans every year.
Rochdale is not a coastal town, but it looks like the good Councillor Brett is not managing to keep to the 5-point plan to give the town the noble plastic-free status he put forward last January.
* Sperm whales normally feed mostly
on giant squid, supplemented with octopus, fish, shrimp, crab, and
small sharks. They are found throughout all the world’s oceans and are listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act and considered depleted under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.I'm told by people who were at the Rochdale Town Hall special 'Xmas Do' that the cups available were plastic coated as well. Thus the sperm whale in Indonesia won't have had chance to gourge itself on the this debre.
It seems that Indonesia, with a population of 263 million people and 34,000 miles (54,716 kilometers) of coastline, ranked second, behind China, on a list of the top 20 worst polluters of plastic trash to the world’s ocean, according to a 2015 study that found 192 coastal countries contribute a combined total of 8.5 million tons of plastic waste to the oceans every year.
Rochdale is not a coastal town, but it looks like the good Councillor Brett is not managing to keep to the 5-point plan to give the town the noble plastic-free status he put forward last January.
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