#166 of 166 articles from the Special Report:
Food Insider
About 10 trillion plastic pellets are leaked into the environment each year, polluting waterways worldwide. Photo by Kajsa Sjölander / Greenpeace
Investors are forcing the world’s biggest plastic manufacturers to reveal how many harmful plastic pellets they are leaking into rivers, lakes and oceans worldwide.
Factories, trains, ships and trucks spill about 10 trillion of the lentil-sized pellets, or nurdles, used to make all plastic products, into the environment each year enough to make roughly 15 million plastic bottles. Once in aquatic environments, pellets become toxic, poisonous magnets for birds, fish and other animals.
There seems to be a never-ending supply of disposable cups and lids, fast-foot wrappers, bits of Styrofoam, cigarette butts and, lately, face masks. He scoops them out of street gutters and from bushes and hedges along roadways and around parks and playgrounds. Since Dec. 13, he has collected 360 litres of litter, Boudinot said. “And that’s just west Fernwood.” Boudinot has created a grid of the entire neighbourhood from Yates and Shelbourne streets over to Cook Street, and he is determined to do it all. And then start over again. It started in June as a pandemic project when the University of Victoria librarian and father of two young kids, ages 5 and 8, began working from home. Now it’s a mission to make his neighbourhood a nicer place to live.