Malaysia urged to cut down on plastic packaging for cleaner seas

KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 17, 2020, BT. An analysis of Asia’s worst ocean polluters shows Malaysians are the biggest individual consumers of plastic packaging, green group WWF said on Monday, urging the government to limit single-use plastics and work with companies to fund a recycling push, The Business Times reported.

The WWF report on plastics looked at China, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam – which contribute 60 per cent of the estimated 8 million tonnes of plastic that enter the world’s oceans each year.

It focused on household consumption of plastic packaging – the plastic most likely to end up in seas – and found that 27 million tonnes were consumed across all six nations in 2016, the most recent year for which reliable data was available.

Globally the volume of plastic waste going into the ocean is set to quadruple between 2010 and 2050, meaning that the sea could contain more plastic by weight than fish by mid-century, the report noted.

Meanwhile, carbon emissions associated with plastic – from production to burning – reached 860 million tonnes in 2019, greater than the annual emissions of Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines combined, it added.