Plastic straws (straws, straws, bulbs, straws), cotton swabs, and disposable plates are just the most striking examples. But the idea of ​​banning all disposable products made from plastic is ringing louder. The UK has just announced its ban and the draft of the European directive has just been leaked, which would do the same across the continent from August.

If yesterday we talked about Hawaii banning (various chemicals present in most) sun creams, today environmental policy is turning this around. And it is not surprising, according to estimates each year 46,000 million plastic bottles, 36,400 million straws, 16,000 million disposable cups and 2,500 million single-use food containers are discarded each year.

While Theresa May announced the decision to ban these types of products because “plastic waste is one of the greatest environmental challenges facing the country.” The text of the draft recognizes that regulating a very limited number of objects would reduce 86% of the plastics found on the Union’s beaches.

This is good news. Everything seems to indicate that it can have a really important impact on the cleanliness of our rivers, beaches and oceans. A good example of this is that, as May explained, the rest of the initiatives that have been introduced (the tax on plastic bags, the deposit of plastic bottles or the prohibition of microbeads in cleaning products) are already being noticed on plastics levels in UK waters.

And it is curious how small measures can have a much more important impact than we might expect. Without leaving the UK, the rate of plastic bags reduced their use by 90%. That’s 9 billion bags less.

The British Prime Minister explained that, according to her estimates, there are “more than 150 million tons of plastic in the world’s oceans and a million birds and more than 100,000 marine mammals killed by eating and becoming entangled in plastic waste each year. And not only that, projections say that the plastic in the oceans will triple in the next decade.

The symbolic battle against the 8.5 billion plastic straws that are thrown away annually in the country has led McDonald’s to recall plastic straws from its stores on British soil. It is a beginning, but there are very strong changes that are on the horizon.