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"SEA turtle thanks rescuers” was the general gist, so of course I had to watch this little snippet of video footage.
The turtle is agonisingly bound up in plastic rope – I must say I wondered if he’d recover full use of his front leg – and it’s true, he turns and approaches his rescuer for a long, meaningful and trusting sharing of eye-contact.
In this instance it’s rope, in others it’s plastic bags. Autopsies have revealed that one in three leatherback turtles have plastic bags in their stomachs, which often end up killing them.
In 1997, Captain Charles Moore discovered that there was a vast ‘slick’ of mostly plastic waste in the middle of the northern Pacific Ocean, dubbed the Great North Pacific Garbage Patch. The waste has been studied since then; it comes from the West Coast of America, from Japan and South-East Asia, stuff that has washed into rivers and out to sea.
The plastic bobs on and under the ocean surface over a vast area: one observer said that, if you counted only the waste that was crammed together, it was about the size of Texas, but if you measured the sparser outlying areas, then it would be about the size of Africa. It’s reckoned to hold about 3.5 million tons of waste – 80% of it plastic.
Since then, we’ve discovered four more such patches: one in the southern Pacific, two in the northern and southern Atlantic, and another in the Indian Ocean.
That’s a helluva lot of waste. It kills a lot of marine life, tangled in the rings that package beer cans, the loops and shreds of plastic bags and other debris; sea creatures that have evolved in a plastics-free ocean fatally mistake wobbly pieces of wrapping in the water for prey such as jelly fish and ingest the stuff; and there’s potential harm from the chemicals that leach out of plastic.
Who’s responsible for the clean-up? How can we deal with this problem? Perhaps we should put levies on the products so that funds raised can be used for clean-up? We’re talking principles here. What might work also depends on the country involved and factors like corruption.
Fees for plastic bags have been far more successful in other parts of the world than in South Africa – Ireland’s use of bags dropped by 90% after a fee was instituted, for example. And what becomes of the money collected this way in South Africa is matter for another article.
Should we place limits on the use of plastic? Should we hold manufacturers of plastic accountable for the life cycle of their product – or should we lay that responsibility at the door of those who use them?
It’s called the ‘polluter pays’ principle, and it sensibly holds that anyone introducing a dangerous substance into the environment, one which causes harm to humans, animals or ecosystems, should carry the costs of managing the impact, whether that means mitigation or clean-up after the event.
If an industry produces dioxin run-off (among the most dangerous man-made chemicals), for instance, isn’t it sensible for governments to require the strictest of controls, or ban use entirely?
I’ve been thinking of this because of the outraged reaction to some Wits research last week, assessing the impact of a tax on beverages with added sugar.
“Nanny state, nanny state!” panted the furious callers to one radio show. “We can’t have the state deciding what we should and shouldn’t eat… where will it all end?” I’ve heard one proponent of libertarian ideals even suggest that the state might end up regulating everything with health risks, including sex (yes, I know, nonsense isn’t it).
Now read: First sin tax and now sweet tax?
As Dr Aaron Motsoaledi has pointed out (in the context of limits on salt in processed food), some ingredients – of which sugar is a prime example – are now widely accepted to have profound impacts on public health.
Take for example a study published this year in the Journal of the American Medical Association: Internal Medicine, in which the authors showed “a significant relationship between added sugar consumption and increased risk for CVD [cardiovascular disease] mortality”. (Added Sugar Intake and Cardiovascular Diseases Mortality Among US Adults, Quanhe Yang et al.)
And that’s just heart health, never mind the implications for obesity and diabetes.
The average South African is eating about twice as much sugar as the generous recommended daily allowance – about 17 teaspoons. (There’s interesting info on our sugar use here.)
Anything that affects public health also affects our pockets. The rapid rise in incidence of heart disease and diabetes alone accounts for a worrying proportion of our public health spend, and also accounts for some of the increases in medical schemes premiums.
The end result of excessive consumption hits us all in the pocket. If we can slow the increase by making the consumption of too much sugar financially unattractive, surely that’s worth considering in a measured fashion? (Note: we’d achieve this, not by banning sugar as a totalitarian state might consider doing by simply by making it more costly; and not by taxing the manufacturers, either. I doubt their profit would be much affected either; sugar is pretty addictive, so people would pay more to use less rather than give it up.)
I’m not sure that this tax is the right answer, but throwing knee-jerk reactions like ‘nanny state’ around doesn’t get us any further. If we don’t turn this juggernaut around, it will take a financial and personal toll of all of us.
- Fin24
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on twitter.
The turtle is agonisingly bound up in plastic rope – I must say I wondered if he’d recover full use of his front leg – and it’s true, he turns and approaches his rescuer for a long, meaningful and trusting sharing of eye-contact.
In this instance it’s rope, in others it’s plastic bags. Autopsies have revealed that one in three leatherback turtles have plastic bags in their stomachs, which often end up killing them.
In 1997, Captain Charles Moore discovered that there was a vast ‘slick’ of mostly plastic waste in the middle of the northern Pacific Ocean, dubbed the Great North Pacific Garbage Patch. The waste has been studied since then; it comes from the West Coast of America, from Japan and South-East Asia, stuff that has washed into rivers and out to sea.
The plastic bobs on and under the ocean surface over a vast area: one observer said that, if you counted only the waste that was crammed together, it was about the size of Texas, but if you measured the sparser outlying areas, then it would be about the size of Africa. It’s reckoned to hold about 3.5 million tons of waste – 80% of it plastic.
Since then, we’ve discovered four more such patches: one in the southern Pacific, two in the northern and southern Atlantic, and another in the Indian Ocean.
That’s a helluva lot of waste. It kills a lot of marine life, tangled in the rings that package beer cans, the loops and shreds of plastic bags and other debris; sea creatures that have evolved in a plastics-free ocean fatally mistake wobbly pieces of wrapping in the water for prey such as jelly fish and ingest the stuff; and there’s potential harm from the chemicals that leach out of plastic.
Who’s responsible for the clean-up? How can we deal with this problem? Perhaps we should put levies on the products so that funds raised can be used for clean-up? We’re talking principles here. What might work also depends on the country involved and factors like corruption.
Fees for plastic bags have been far more successful in other parts of the world than in South Africa – Ireland’s use of bags dropped by 90% after a fee was instituted, for example. And what becomes of the money collected this way in South Africa is matter for another article.
Should we place limits on the use of plastic? Should we hold manufacturers of plastic accountable for the life cycle of their product – or should we lay that responsibility at the door of those who use them?
It’s called the ‘polluter pays’ principle, and it sensibly holds that anyone introducing a dangerous substance into the environment, one which causes harm to humans, animals or ecosystems, should carry the costs of managing the impact, whether that means mitigation or clean-up after the event.
If an industry produces dioxin run-off (among the most dangerous man-made chemicals), for instance, isn’t it sensible for governments to require the strictest of controls, or ban use entirely?
I’ve been thinking of this because of the outraged reaction to some Wits research last week, assessing the impact of a tax on beverages with added sugar.
“Nanny state, nanny state!” panted the furious callers to one radio show. “We can’t have the state deciding what we should and shouldn’t eat… where will it all end?” I’ve heard one proponent of libertarian ideals even suggest that the state might end up regulating everything with health risks, including sex (yes, I know, nonsense isn’t it).
Now read: First sin tax and now sweet tax?
As Dr Aaron Motsoaledi has pointed out (in the context of limits on salt in processed food), some ingredients – of which sugar is a prime example – are now widely accepted to have profound impacts on public health.
Take for example a study published this year in the Journal of the American Medical Association: Internal Medicine, in which the authors showed “a significant relationship between added sugar consumption and increased risk for CVD [cardiovascular disease] mortality”. (Added Sugar Intake and Cardiovascular Diseases Mortality Among US Adults, Quanhe Yang et al.)
And that’s just heart health, never mind the implications for obesity and diabetes.
The average South African is eating about twice as much sugar as the generous recommended daily allowance – about 17 teaspoons. (There’s interesting info on our sugar use here.)
Anything that affects public health also affects our pockets. The rapid rise in incidence of heart disease and diabetes alone accounts for a worrying proportion of our public health spend, and also accounts for some of the increases in medical schemes premiums.
The end result of excessive consumption hits us all in the pocket. If we can slow the increase by making the consumption of too much sugar financially unattractive, surely that’s worth considering in a measured fashion? (Note: we’d achieve this, not by banning sugar as a totalitarian state might consider doing by simply by making it more costly; and not by taxing the manufacturers, either. I doubt their profit would be much affected either; sugar is pretty addictive, so people would pay more to use less rather than give it up.)
I’m not sure that this tax is the right answer, but throwing knee-jerk reactions like ‘nanny state’ around doesn’t get us any further. If we don’t turn this juggernaut around, it will take a financial and personal toll of all of us.
- Fin24
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on twitter.
