I saw this a few weeks back. Happy to be reminded of it again! Its the kind of good news I can read over and over again :) Although its a little bitter sweet, being in WA we seem to have missed out for some reason. Hopefully that’ll change in the future.

In the government’s latest reporting period of 2023–2024, Australians consumed 4 million tonnes of plastic and packaging. That was an additional 100,000 tonnes on the year prior.

We can’t forget the ‘Reduce’ is really what matters in all our consumption networks, whether we reduce by,

• Efficiency, like fuel emissions, or energy production,
• Circular Economies, such as aluminium cans or FOGO,
• Simply changing our behaviours, maybe like plastic straws and plastic bags. Although I see a lot of ‘reuseable’ bags strewn around the place, so maybe not super succesful examples.

“I remember those [smoking and drink driving] ads from years ago … they were all pretty powerful in terms of getting a very clear message across,” she said.

“Imagine if we had ads that say, ‘If you don’t dispose of your household rubbish appropriately, you could actually end up having microplastics in your system.’”

Yeah, i’m not gona bother imagining that. Its a non-starter without major clothing changes.

Most plastic that goes into our bodies is from the bin-bags we call clothes. Stool sample tests I’ve read about have shown this. Its not even a competition between sources of plastic in our system. So any communications strategy that doesn’t take into account the spanx wearing elephant in the room is a waste and could be detimental to the cause.