The statement by the environment minister on World Oceans Day explained that the government’s ‘Saving Our Blue’ campaign will this year be focusing on the importance of protecting marine protection areas. The minister, Aaron Farrugia, seems to imply that previously this was not the case.

In May, the same minister highlighted the deployment and maintenance of a number of sea bins, to trap pieces of floating litter and plastic, as a key ‘Saving Our Blue’ initiative. The Environment and Resources Authority website page covering the initiative states that “The litter collected by these sea bins will later be analysed and studied in detail and the related data will be used to develop new environmental initiatives”. It adds that “the information that will be collected will be crucial”.

The minister and his team seem singularly ignorant about what constitutes marine litter and how it gets there. There must be hundreds of members of eNGOs and other individuals who have participated in beach and marine clean-ups in Malta over many years who could answer that question exhaustively. There are also numerous international studies, some also focused on the Mediterranean Sea.

Clean-ups are commendable and necessary and need to be done far more frequently. However, what is mostly expected of Minister Farrugia is to stop the flow of plastic waste with preventive action at source, not studies and analysis to conclude what is already known.

The other focus of Malta’s ‘Saving Our Blue’ campaign is the damage done by microplastics. The ERA May press release states: “This (clean-up) work… is paving the way for the total prohibition of sale of single-use plastics in Malta as from January of next year.”

This part of the statement is surely wrong as all Malta has done is ban the importation of a few single-use plastic items, such as plastic bags, cutlery, straws, plates, cotton buds, food containers and stirrers, in December 2020. The sale of these items is banned from January 2022. This hardly matches the bold statement made by ERA.

All shelves in supermarkets and in the vast majority of shops in Malta will remain packed solid with single-use plastic packaging and plastic products. The telecommunications, food, toys, beverage and domestic appliances industries, to name just a few, are huge importers of single-use plastic. The importation of plastic products and parts is growing exponentially. Importation is the only source and cause of Malta’s plastic-waste problem.

Another claim made by ERA in May was that the plastic trash collected in the clean-ups would be exported for recycling. This statement is incorrect for the reason that most plastic waste cannot be recycled as it is too dirty, simply unrecyclable or too degraded – plastic trash collected in clean-ups is of this type.

Plastic items that can be processed again are down-cycled once or maybe twice and then all of it is just trash that will continue to pollute for tens to hundreds of years. Earlier this year, the NAO revealed that only under two per cent of Malta’s 2019 and 2020 plastic waste was in fact recycled.

The Mediterranean Sea is declared to be the most plastic polluted body of water in the world. This is the major source of plastic in our bays, beaches and in our 11,500 km2 of fisheries management conservation zone.

The problem cannot be consumer behaviour when consumers have no other choice. The problem is the forever increasing importation of ultimately unrecyclable plastic parts, products and packaging, exacerbated by greenwashing and an entire political class in denial.