A Plastic Free Australia

Is recycling just another form of greenwashing?

Plastics are made from fossil fuels and generate around 1.8 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions each year. In Australia, the govenerment’s recycling targets are far from being met with only 13% of plastics being recycled each year. Even so, microplastics are shed throughout the lifecycle of plastic products and also during the recycling process.

It’s been reported that each person ingests about a credit card size in plastics each week. That’s roughly 5 g a week or an average of 100,000 g of microplastics every year. The implications of all this plastic on our health is a critical issue.

These are some of the topics we’ll cover in our plastics webinar. We’ll share ideas for reducing plastic use in your life. We’ll look at increasing momentum towards phasing out plastics and shifting the country towards recycling targets and a circular economy that will minimise plastic waste and lead to materials being recovered, reused, recycled and repurposed. Together with the audience, we’ll uncover whether recycling is just another form of greenwashing….

Join:

Rebecca Prince-Ruiz, Executive Director and Founder of the Plastic Free Foundation
Dr Deborah Lau, CSIRO’s Ending Plastic Waste Mission Lead
Dr Thava Palanisami, Environmental Plastics Innovation Cluster(EPIC), The University of Newcastle
Nina Gbor, Director of the Waste & Circular Economy Program at the Australia Institute
for an interactive discussion on plastic waste in Australia.