FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – The enormous amount of plastic on the planet is setting off a global alarm.
Scientists warn that there are now 21,000 pieces of plastic for each of the Earth’s 8 billion residents, a number that’s been doubling every six years according to a study recently released by the 5 Gyres Institute.
But it’s not just individuals who must address this crisis. So too must corporations, many of which contribute to this growing disaster.
Recently, a group of DirecTV employees came to Fort Lauderdale Beach and got a crash course in microplastic pollution.
“This is pieces of plastic that used to be something bigger, but the sun has photo degraded them,” said Dave Doebler, a co-founder of Volunteer Cleanup. “And so now they are now brittle, and they’ve been in the ocean, so now they break into smaller and smaller pieces.”
DirecTV sales reps and department heads from all over the country came to South Florida for a corporate retreat at the Courtyard Marriott on Seabreeze Boulevard.
The group took time from their day of meetings to give back to Mother Nature by cleaning up the beach.
“The hardest part is determining what’s a seashell and what’s a microplastic,” said Jeremy Madison, DirecTV’s sales account manager from Dallas.
“You think the beach is really clean, and there’s a lot of little micro plastic,” said Eric King, DirecTV’s vice president of sales in Atanta. “It tells you there’s a lot more of this out here than you could ever imagine.”
Doebler organized the effort.
“We are drowning in single use plastics,” he said. “So these folks came from all over the country, and they just had a really eye opening experience to the tremendous problem of marine debris that we have out here.”
Tiny bits of plastic so insidious, there’s now over 170 trillion pieces in the world’s ocean. Scientists say humans consume a credit card’s worth of microplastic every week, it’s now been found in human blood and even breast milk.
“And if the animals are eating these plastics that I didn’t even realize were there until I started looking, I can imagine the type of impact that’s going to have on my kids and in the long term,” said Aaron Banda, DirecTV Southeast sales manager.
The crisis is so alarming that Doebler’s seen an uptick in these corporate days of service.
Clean Miami Beach hosted 36 corporate cleanups last year. So far this year, they’ve organized 43, with 10 more still scheduled before the end of the year.
The impact from these opportunities of service go way beyond the doing. It’s what those team members will take back home with that that will really have a lasting impression.
“We’re not only looking for what individuals can do to be a part of solving the marine debris problem, but also the role of business and how the business can produce less single use plastics that they then put out onto the market,” Doebler said.
When Doebler hosted a cleanup for St. Dalfour Fruit Spreads, the employees were so impacted by what they experienced, the company removed with the plastic, tamper-proof seal on 60% of its products, resulting in 23 tons of reduced plastic waste.
It’s a shift, and now the onus is on DirecTV.
“I would challenge whoever does the manufacturing,” Doebler said. “Are they coming in plastic bags? Are they coming in styrofoam? Can we shift to something that is more biodegradable?”
Team members were already showing signs of inspiration.
“Just being conscious about what kind of materials we’re using in our packaging,” said Banda. “If we have the ability to use some sort of biodegradable equipment, or even have a recycling program set in place when customers are done with that equipment, they can recycle it afterwards.”
As Local 10 News has shown throughout its Don’t Trash Our Treasure campaign, every little bit helps.
Doebler said the goal is to get these corporations to see that they’re not giving consumers a lot of choice. Most every product comes packaged in some kind of plastic.
What these experiences challenge the business to do is to reduce the amount of single-use plastic in products so the consumer doesn’t have to throw away so much trash.
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