From Beyond magazine: Issue 14: Possible Words feature And Today - a roundup of good things happening around the world:
In Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, he describes returning to his South African village after years in prison, only to find the water polluted, the buildings run down and “the countryside littered with plastic bags and wrappers. We had not known of plastic when I was a boy, and though it surely improved life in some ways, its presence in Qunu appeared to me to be a kind of blight.”
This plastic blight can be spotted from the coasts of Mexico to the deserts of the Middle East. In the world’s oceans, one of the biggest problems is “nurdles”—a kind of plastic pellet that are both the building blocks and the end of plastic products breaking up under sunlight and water. It is estimated that there are six times as many nurdles as zooplankton in some of the world’s oceans and fish and birds that are autopsied are regularly filled with nurdles.
The government of Somalialand recently banned “the importation, production and use of plastic bags in the country”. The bags, caught in trees and shrubs, are ugly but also dangerous. Wildlife and cattle ingest them. Soil is contaminated as the plastic breaks down and discarded bags fill with rainwater providing a perfect breeding ground for malaria-carrying mosquitos.
While it remains to be seen whether the leaders of Somalialand will have the political will to follow up the ban, the attempt, the willingness to try, will continue to bring more attention to the problems of plastic.
And from Rocketboom:
