Urban legend has it that the average person eats eight spiders per year while sleeping. While that (thankfully) isn’t true, a new consumer engagement campaign, that launched this month for WWF points to some statistics that unfortunately are all too real.
The campaign, called “Your Plastic Diet” created by Grey Malaysia seeks to draw attention to the ongoing crisis our planet is facing. The campaign uses easily recognisable household objects like credit cards, combs and pens to quantify the amounts of plastic people are ingesting, in the hope that these visuals will shock people, companies and governments into taking action
In a recent interview Grey Malaysia creative director Graham Drew said: “The key for us was to shift the conversation from an environmental crisis to a personal health crisis – it’s not happening to ‘the world’, that you can close the door on, it is happening to you; and you can’t avoid it!”
The campaign was based on a study called ‘No Plastic in Nature’ which found people were consuming about 2000 small pieces of plastic every week, equivalent to 5 grams a week, that’s the weight of a credit card! After one month of swallowing plastic, you’re up to 21 grams, or an entire clothes hanger!
The fully integrated campaign also includes a website (www.yourplasticdiet.com) which encourages people to take a test based on their individual diet to determine their personal weekly plastic consumption.
While saying ‘no’ to straws and bringing along a reusable bag are great first steps, which you absolutely must do, it’s governments and businesses who need to do more. This campaign is mobilizing the public to support a global petition calling for a legally binding treaty on marine plastics pollution. All stakeholders in the entire chain in the plastic system, from manufacturers to producers, need to step up and be held accountable to the common goal of ending plastic pollution. It’s now very apparent that this “Plastic Diet” is now something we are all on, whether we like it or not.