Maltese governments have always sought economic growth by exploiting the country’s natural environment. There is nothing new about this. What is alarming is human activity in Malta is now well beyond sustainable and the country’s natural ecosystems are in a catastrophic freefall. We are eating and breathing pollution.

Politicians continue to see exploitation, now over-exploitation, as their mandate. The new mantra is the circular economy. Essentially this means business as usual. 

The plan is now to recycle or reuse everything back into the production cycle. We no longer think that activity in our country needs to be sustainable so long as we can set recycling targets at conveniently distant future dates. 

The Environment and Resources Authority’s Single Use Plastic Strategy for Malta is based on curtailing demand for plastic products by having awareness campaigns, waste separation bins, voluntary schemes, disposal instructions, increasing costs for consumers and producers, introduction of reusable and refillable plastic containers, replacing polystyrene fishing floats with plastic floats and other restrictive measures. 

There is one fundamental flaw in this strategy. Plastic was never a consumer choice. It was, and is without a doubt, the producer’s choice. It’s about supply and not about demand. This changes everything.

Malta’s ERA and the EU have identified an odd 20 single-use plastic items for restrictive regulations. However, these efforts sink into insignificance when the industry is multiplying the production of single-use plastic for use across all products. The petrochemical industry is planning to increase plastic production by 40 per cent in the next 10 years as it diversifies away from fuel. Plastic production in Europe and worldwide is out of control and it has reached epidemic proportions. The EU’s strategy should be to make the industry produce much less, not more. 

In Malta plastic waste is largely landfilled, exported for incineration and dispersed in our land and marine environment, thus continuing to pollute for hundreds of years in our own or other countries’ backyards. We need to ban importation of single-use plastic and eventually all plastic except the most durable items that are easily collected and recycled. Plastic is an extraordinarily toxic material and producers should never have been pushed upon us for 70 years.

The Mediterranean Sea is one of the most plastic polluted seas in the world. The ERA strategy says nothing of what Malta is going to do to clean its territorial waters from this plastic scourge. It is estimated that by 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in the oceans and seas. Marine life has been eating plastic for decades and plastic is now present in our food chain. 

The ERA report states that we have this plastic problem because we have leakages from the various stages of the plastic cycle within the circular economy. What does this even mean? 

Nobody in Malta believes we can regulate our way out of this, given our notorious track record on law enforcement. In Malta we need to protect our own. 

Our island territory is a closed and finite system. Exporting plastic trash is no longer possible. The EU used to export 60 per cent of its plastic waste to China. China has last year closed its borders to plastic waste and other Asian and African countries are sending shiploads back where they came from. 

Nobody wants our trash. We need to do our best to stop plastic at our border, as once it crosses, it becomes our problem with nowhere else to go.