(MONTRÉAL) – In response to the news that a whale washed ashore in the Philippines on Saturday with 40 kilos of plastic bags in its gut, Agnès Le Rouzic, Greenpeace Canada’s Oceans & Plastics Campaigner, said:
“Yet another whale has died, its belly full of single-use plastics, while in Canada we hold meetings, ask for more consultations, give subsidies to the plastics industry and ignore the reality of the impact our addiction to plastic has on our oceans and marine life. The effects of plastic pollution on marine life are the most visible in Southeast Asia, but this is a global crisis. It is deplorable that Canada keeps dumping our plastic trash on countries in Southeast Asia that are already struggling under a momentous plastic crisis of their own.
The only way to stop plastic pollution is to ban the production of single-use plastics and demand companies like Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Nestlé do their part to drastically reduce their plastic production at the source. By letting these companies go about their business as usual, we are all responsible for this whale’s death and the countless other species that suffer and die in our oceans.”
This whale washed ashore just hours after a minority of countries, led by the US, managed to block ambitious proposals to tackle plastic pollution at the source during the UN environment conference in Nairobi last week. Despite the strong will and recommendations from countries around the world to set clear reduction limits and a commitment to phase out single-use plastics by 2025 at this UN conference, the US actively worked to impose the weaker, non-binding proposals that were finally adopted.
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For more information, please contact:
Philippa Duchastel de Montrouge, Communications Officer, Greenpeace Canada, [email protected]; + 1 (514) 929-8227
