Single-use face masks aren’t just to be found scattered across shop car parks and on local greens but also, as new footage reveals, on some of the worlds most beautiful – and delicate – ecosystems. Divers in the Philippines have found scads of used masks on coral reefs close to the country’s capital, Manila. The BBC has the story.
According to an estimate by the Asian Development Bank, the city has been generating an extra 280 tonnes of medical waste per day, since the beginning of the Covid pandemic.
Environmental groups are warning that the plastic inside face masks is breaking down and being consumed by marine wildlife. They’re urging the Philippine government to improve its handling of medical waste, to prevent further pollution of the seas.
Howard Johnson, a BBC News Philippines Correspondent, filmed at the reef to show the extent of the damage being done.
Single-use face masks have been termed the ‘new plastic bags’, and are bound to be the cause of a great amount of damage to ecosystems across the world due to the large quantity being used (with threats of fines for non-wearers). Last August, the Mail reported that “124,000 tons of unrecyclable masks – the equivalent weight of 10,000 London buses – could be dumped each year”, and that, by November, gloves and face masks could be found on almost a third of all British beaches.
Worth watching in full.
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Time for a Stalinist purge on the Civil Service.
100% (evil scum bags)
“stopping primary school children from adopting new pronouns”
Except you can’t really “adopt a new pronoun” unless you’re talking about yourself. All you can do is ask or force other people to “adopt new pronouns” when referring to you. Compelled speech.
Yet again the legal profession is the enabler for society’s current ills.
I would say it’s more about encouraging others to police speech otherwise how else would mis-pronouning be identified? Children might report fellow-pupils for a laugh or out of malice and will not know how dangerous it is. It then becomes embedded in society.
Time the state was effectively abolished as it’s failed. Monetary freedom is the only way this can actually be achieved. Whilst the state has a monopoly on money it can largely do as it pleases, including stealing our money with impunity either through taxation or inflation. God bless Mrs Thatcher but she was not anything like radical enough.
Yes, Minister. Appleby crawling out of the woodwork? Maybe not much has changed in the Service.
I fail to see how civil servants can think that age based equality allows a 5 year old to enjoy the same rights as adults to “change gender” yet a 20 year old with a wife, baby and mortgage is not entitled to the full minimum wage.
Tge Tories will not get sympathy but brick bats for enabling the supremacy of the blob. When Blair and Brown were undermining the institutions the Tories were supportive or irrelevant. Since coming into government in 2910 they have carried on with it.
we must get rid of them.
Getting rid of the Tories is all well and good but let us not forget we now live in a one party state. Changing the name of the notionally party in power will not alter the colour of the politics it will simply change the shade.
Nobody in the UK is forced to vote for either the Tories or Labour. The problem is that there are too many people like some people here, who are opposed to the (current) Tories and Labour, who don’t vote. Not voting is a vote for the status quo of Tories or Labour.
Voting for Independents or a centre Right challenger is an option.
We need to move to the system they have in the US whereby each new government appoints what are currently permanent secretaries und deputy secretaries in each department and if they don’t do the minister’s bidding, including making sure the people under them stay in line, they get sacked.
I was looking for examples of right wing rather than socialist dictatorships and many so-called information sources immediately equate right wing politics with totalitarianism. It would seem that the internet has been taken over by the left.