MORE than 8-in-10 Britons (81 percent) want companies to embrace the shift from plastic to innovative alternatives, a new poll has revealed on Earth Overshoot Day.
The poll was commissioned by materials and solutions platform PlasticFree.
Earth Overshoot Day marks the date when humanity’s demand for ecological resources and services in a given year exceeds what nature can regenerate in that year. It reflects the average for all countries.
However most developed countries use up their allocation much earlier with UAE, Canada and USA at 13th March and UK at 15th May.
The survey comes as the world’s most iconic outdoor digital billboard, the NASDAQ screen in Times Square, and leading media platforms are set to broadcast a powerful message of hope and possibility, calling on the creative industry to design differently.
The world’s leading media platforms support the call to action, including Dezeen, Dieline and Waterbear.
PlasticFree is the first global solutions platform, created to empower the 160 million global creatives to rethink packaging, textiles and products.
The platform has in-depth reports on over hundreds of plastic-free alternatives and insights in system changes such as solid formulations and permanent reusable packaging.
Powered by global solutions group, A Plastic Planet, it helps designers and business leaders eradicate one trillion pieces of plastic waste from the global economy by 2025.
The platform is used daily by global brands including Unilever, Accenture and Reckitt, all organisations committed to less dependency on plastic.
Earth Overshoot Day is hosted and calculated by Global Footprint Network, an international research organization that provides decision-makers with a menu of tools to help the human economy operate within Earth’s ecological limits.
Sian Sutherland, co-founder of A Plastic Planet and PlasticFree, said: “In the last six years, we’ve used more resources than in the entire 20th century.
“We have become so used to our single-use lifestyles, we cannot imagine a different way. We think change is going to be about living a life of less; but if we embrace change, our future can be so abundant, optimistic and fair, without waste, without depleting Nature so it can no longer support us.
Our planet gives us so many genuinely renewable materials. We simply need to borrow them from Nature, keeping them toxin and plastic free so they can go back to nature safely. Nature is of course a perfect circle, with no waste whatsoever. Plastic simply destroys that circularity.
We work closely with industry on solutions because business is the lever of change. There is no consumer goods company in the world that doesn’t want to reduce their use of plastic. Plastic is the old economy, and we focus on helping them create for the new economy.
On this symbolic day when we have run out of resources, we call on the creative industry to use their extraordinary powers to help humanity design our way out of this depletive current model, leading us into a bright exciting future where we live in harmony with our beautiful home, Earth.”
Earlier this year UN Secretary General António Guterres said: “Microplastics find their way into the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe.
“Plastic is made from fossil fuels – the more plastic we produce, the more fossil fuel we burn, and the worse we make the climate crisis. But we have solutions.”
“We must work as one – governments, companies, and consumers alike – to break our addiction to plastics, champion zero waste, and build a truly circular economy”, he added.