We the undersigned petition the council to Eliminate all single-use plastic within council-managed buildings and facilities, by 2021, and eliminate single-use plastic from its supply chain, by 2025. Request and encourage all businesses with which we engage, via our procurement network, to support the banning of single-use plastic from their place of work. Ask the waste management team to prepare a report considering how they could promote the reduction of single-use plastic across the Borough, including supporting plastic-free initiatives such as plastic-free communities and plastic-free schools, and to highlight areas of further lobbying to central government by both collection and waste disposal authorities, and for this report to be prepared and then presented at council within 6 months.

Having recognised, both at a local level and a national level, that we are living through an unprecedented climate and ecological emergency, we know that radical action is needed to reduce our contribution to anthropogenic climate-change and environmental breakdown.

We acknowledge that the prevalence of single-use plastics in packaging and manufacturing of everyday items is a significant contributor to this process, both because it is carbon-intensive to manufacture and because over 50% of the plastic we produce is used only once, then thrown away.

Recent research has estimated that over 8 million metric tons of plastic waste end up in the oceans each year, endangering marine life and breaking down into chemical compounds which subsequently end up in a food chain that directly affects human life the world over.

This Petition ran from 03/06/2019 to 09/09/2019 and has now finished.

256 people signed this Petition.