Singapore's Plastic Problem: Can We Curb Our Plastic Addiction? | Climate Change: A Wicked Problem

[Music] that's a typhoon starting a thunderstorm over a warm ocean first one storm then another each gaining strength as warm air from these storms combined with warm air rising from the water's surface under the right conditions they soon merge into one massive terrifying storm a category 5 typhoon traveling at wind speeds of up to 250 kilometers per hour the super storms rip apart our homes and pummel our cities and there's another reason to fear typhoons along the coast powerful winds can push the water onto shore leading to a rise in sea level it's called a storm surge and it causes massive flooding what you saw on your screens was created from my imagination but for millions of people in southeast asia deadly typhoons are a terrible reality and as global warming heats up our oceans they will become more intense unpredictable and deadly i'm general puducherry a politician and a father of three twin identities that push me to want to confront one of the biggest challenges facing our country and the planet climate change in this episode i take a deep dive into one of the major contributors to climate change plastic yeah that's disgusting yeah in that 10 minutes or less but curbing our addiction to plastic feels like an impossible task it smells like coffee it's like almost like rotting food we've really enjoyed the convenience of this but it just appears excessive can you guess how long it takes singapore to use this number of plastic bags i'm finding out what we must do when do we have to get started 10 years ago after all this is our plastic problem plastic was invented in 1869 and it was first used to make this a billiard ball these used to be made out of elephant ivory back then billiards was a very popular game and the slaughter of wild elephants couldn't keep up [Music] people at the time praised the invention plastic saying this new material would protect nature from the destructive forces of human need the irony is that plastics have now become one of the key reasons why our natural world and our climate are under threat [Music] from cutlery to disposable shopping bags to packaging plastic has become the superhero of modern life here's a staggering statistic to consider in every single minute one million plastic drinking bottles are sold around the world so in five seconds [Music] that's about eighty thousand plastic bottles sold singapore's love affair with plastic started in the boom years of the 1960s this was a time of nation building industrialization plastics were an engine of growth and increasing wealth spurred a nation of consumers at the time plastic was only beginning to enter our everyday lives it was still so novel it even made the news there's no doubt about it the invention of plastics has been welcomed by every housewife lighting weight easy to keep clean difficult to break or chip completely safe for children and available in gay colors there seems no end to the long list of products that can be made from plastic in the decades since we've come a long way in inventing new uses for the wonder material as i'm about to find out these days plastic has permeated our lives in ways that i'm not aware of i really like science when i was at school especially biology it's one of the reasons i became a doctor i enjoyed chemistry as well but i don't remember learning very much about plastics so i wonder what i'll learn from donald cole today he has spent 16 years revealing the secrets of a level chemistry to 17 and 18 year olds this should be interesting jono can you identify the items with plastic in this fridge uh sure well this mineral water clearly yes um these slices of cheese your packaging as well as around each slice this uh yoghurt as well right i mean the top is sort of foil of some sort but the plastic is on the packaging that's right okay okay but uh you actually missed one uh okay you missed this the can yeah [Music] let me tell you what i've done i removed the paint from this aluminum drink can and i've submerged it in concentrated sodium hydroxide for two hours let's take a look at what's left behind how i can see through yes [Music] so this is actually the plastic inside the can why is there plastic in the can in a company to drink like this it has carbonic acid and the carbonic acid can actually react with the aluminum all right plastic is actually chemically inert so it actually can protect the drink from the can and the can from the drink that i'm very familiar with from my previous profession we would get through several in a day all right so actually uh surgical masks actually made largely by uh polypropylene which is also a plastic fiber so our consumption of these must have gone up quite considerably in the pandemic so no it's not good not good but in fact this is even worse pandemic or no pandemic you're using lots of wet wipe yeah it's largely plastic one last thing i want to show you okay come with me there's so much plastic we don't even know we're using just when i think it can't get worse donald has one more item to show me why don't you try uh to put this a big gloss on styrofoam and fit it into this beaker this whole block into that beaker yes right [Music] holy cow look at that oops so there's lots of bubbles yep and it's falling apart as i feed it in yeah it's like it's eating it up this is actually acetone all right so it's actually a solvent for nail polish acetone breaks down the styrofoam releasing the air what is revealed is polystyrene it's the chemical name for styrofoam and a type of plastic so that's the plastic with all the air removed that's right it's kind of like wow difficult to to manipulate like this it's like a goo look at that that's quite amazing i do feel like a kid again it's estimated that in the last 65 years humans produced 8 billion tons of the stuff that's more than one ton of plastic for every person alive today but our love of the material comes at an increasing cost to our climate and to our children nearly all plastic comes from fossil fuels when we extract oil a global warming air polluting gas called methane is produced we use energy and release greenhouse gases when making plastic we release methane carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide and we continue to do so when we transport the products to the shops at our current rate of production by 2050 it's calculated that carbon emissions from the entire plastic life cycle will triple [Music] from a climate perspective the worst offenders are single-use plastics why because their lifespan is so brief on average we use them for six months before throwing them away but these disposables make up 40 of all the plastic we produce but beyond manufacturing there is another climate consequence to our plastic binge i've come to lazarus island south of singapore with lim tekkun founder of conservation group small change [Music] you ready yeah when you invited me for a beach cleanup this is not what i expected in this murky water it takes a while for my eyes to adjust but i soon discovered to my horror plastic [Music] [Music] [Music] man yeah that's disgusting yeah and that's 10 minutes or less i wasn't even aware of the like marine life i was just aware of all the plastic and all the trash and all the bits that were there yeah okay so what have we got here so this is just like some random plastic bag yeah probably some food packaging black bubble tea how do you know that was how do you know that was about oh i see no no it is right you're right do you like a cheese biscuit okay okay so from the littering we have a pollution problem yes but what's that got to do with climate change one of the concerns we have here is as plastic goes into the ocean with our tropical climate it degrades and or rather it breaks down very quickly uh into microplastics yeah and when it breaks down um there is a concern of whether there will be releases of greenhouse gases or also other organic contaminants okay now these organic contaminants will then possibly affect biodiversity in the ocean biodiversity matters because it affects the ocean's ability to act as a carbon sink a carbon sink absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and a big part of why our oceans can function that way is phytoplankton these are tiny plant-like organisms that make up barely two percent of earth's green matter but they absorb through photosynthesis an astounding forty percent of the world's carbon each year the worry is that microplastics in the ocean can harm these phytoplankton even kill them it is actually a circular problem because when you have climate change and then your ocean starts to get warmer yes the ability of it to be a sink is also affected why because as you get warmer and warmer and you have more and more carbon in the atmosphere the ocean becomes acidified so we have a link between the the emissions that are resulting from the production of the plastics causing some degree of warming yes that warming affecting ocean acidification yes but the the plastics that are generated as a result polluting the ocean possibly reducing the effect of the carbon sink in the phytoplankton so all of these things acidification warming pollution climate change and biodiversity are linked in some way so from every perspective whether it's pollution or climate change i think the key here is for us to really look at our own habits and how companies operate and how we can reduce single-use plastics as a whole when do we have to get started 10 years ago [Music] unbelievable all of this plastic collected at lazarus island in singapore in an hour we've got a major problem on our hand and it's not just a pollution problem it's also a climate change problem because here in singapore we incinerate everything we we dispose of our waste so efficiently maybe we don't see it maybe we don't understand how to care enough about this as a climate change issue but that's what i've learned today it's serious it's urgent and we have to start doing something about it now [Applause] we are more reliant on single-use disposable plastic than ever before but they're also causing irreparable harm to our climate how can i get people to pay attention i feel stuck i need a change of perspective maybe this is the problem island we see samakow as a symbol of our success it's a badge of honor we incinerate all our waste we even generate electricity in the process we seem to have it all figured out but i wonder if our efficiency sometimes works against us because we don't see our waste we don't realize the scale of the problem [Applause] i want to understand how much singaporeans know and care about our plastic addiction and the climate change problem it's creating so i worked with cna to commission a survey we spoke to a thousand two hundred people asking them all kinds of questions about climate change after three months the results are out what i found was that nearly half of the respondents didn't realize that plastics is a climate change problem okay so our awareness isn't quite there but there is a silver lining they were quite clear on what they had to do with the single-use disposable plastics after they were done with them 65 say we recycle which cuts down on the fossil fuels needed to make new plastic over 60 percent know we have to empty out food containers and drink bottles [Music] [Applause] 72 percent know we can recycle egg cartons but bubble wrap only one in two know that [Music] okay so our survey shows that we kind of know what to do but here's the thing according to the national environment agency only four percent of all plastic in singapore gets recycled only four percent compare this to hong kong at 12 percent and taiwan a whopping 73 percent what accounts for our measly four percent [Music] there is only one way to find out i'm headed to the semwaste materials recovery facility [Music] every day about 70 tons of stuff is collected from municipal recycling bins and sent here to be sorted for recycling glass paper metals and plastic [Music] i've asked to see what happens to items collected from my constituency in pongo and i've invited some punggol residents to join me this is what was delivered earlier this truck has just come through having picked up recycling material from 240 bins including in pongo from your home okay so there's four and a half tons worth of material from the blue bins that it has picked up it it smells like coffee yeah it's like almost like rotting food it's quite disgusting do you recognize any of the stuff that you recycled [Music] my face this can be recycled so the metal can can be recycled but the contents inside cannot be recycled so this is contaminated on itself we can't recycle the whole product and that contamination has affected other things as well yes that's right [Music] i found a food basket food packet yeah i think there's water food inside here again one rotten pack of food can easily contaminate everything else in the same recycling bin the grossest thing i've seen is diapers actually diapers see the bulky ways like the the child seat seat yeah you can you can put them into the recycling bin because you can recycle this or in in this facility at all even if they were to dismantle it there's still a lot of other metal parts in there and like the belts and the cushion and all so what's going to happen to this it's going to be considered rejected the bulky ways so it's going to be brought for incineration or landfill sem waste doesn't do any of the actual recycling here what they do is throw out the obvious junk the contaminated stuff and send the rest to the recyclers [Music] once the plastic is sorted they are stacked together two days worth of bin collection and this is all the plastic considered fit for recycling from 140 tons down to just two tons so these bales get shipped off to someone else yes uh either locally or overseas what makes you so sure yeah the reason i'm asking is like when people put them into the recycling bins yes they think those are going to be recycled yeah but what i've learned today is most of the things they put into the recycling bin is not recycled yes so i'm just wondering whether that problem extends down the supply chain you know here so you think all of this is going to be recycled yes and then you ship it out somewhere but actually it doesn't get recycled basically right so these are the salvage lots that we will actually bring them for further recycling yeah so they will definitely get recycled well that was unexpected and it turns out that almost all the plastic that we throw in the blue bins ends up in the incinerator we can't easily recycle our way out of this problem we simply have to cut down on the use of disposable plastics but that's easier said than done i just had to look at our production meals a lot of disposable plastic is imposed on us whether we like it or not plastic is still the default when you order delivery wow look at this that's a lot of plastic for just one meal and we're only in the first week of filming imagine what this will look like when we get to the end of our project in just three weeks of filming this climate change series this is the plastic we accumulated from production meals frankly i'm a little surprised how quickly we filled up this pretty big box to be fair the food delivery companies have made small steps the biggest players grab food panda and delivery no longer give out plastic cutlery you have to ask for it it's a move that saved one million pieces of plastic every week but cutlery is just one part of the problem what about the other plastics we get in our delivery so i asked for a meeting with grab food to find out how they're tackling the issue of plastics in food delivery so here i am and i've brought with me a little present grab is not the only food delivery service in singapore but it has the biggest market share we've really enjoyed the convenience of this but it just appears a bit excessive there's lots of bits of plastic is there something we can do about this i totally agree that this is something that we really need to do and i think grab given our scale and size uh we have the ability to kind of nudge consumers and merchants in the right direction so one of the things that we're going to do we're going to do this trial where we're going to encourage merchants instead of using plastic to use eco packaging when they're doing food packing this is the eco packaging sustainable compostable alternatives made from paper and bio and it seems like i've come at the right time grab is about to run a trial and how it works is we've worked with one of our partners biopack to provide eco packaging to our merchants at a much reduced rate in this trial customers will get to choose if they want their food in the eco packaging or in the plastic containers and is there an increasing cost to me as a consumer because eco packaging is way more expensive by multiple times than plastic the merchants will have the options to charge consumers for that increase in price and at the same time consumers must be must be willing to take this as an option in my opinion i do think regulation is something that needs to also catch up right so i do think regulation is going to be a very big factor in making sure there's mass adoption why do you think regulation's so necessary um many reasons but i think most importantly eco packaging just costs more and i think if regulation isn't there it is a disadvantage for merchants who have to sort of like absorb this cost versus merchants who are not equal conscious it's very unfair so i think their business will be impacted grab will be running the trial for a month and i'll be checking in with them later meanwhile i've got bigger fish to fry i'm speaking of course of singapore's enduring love for plastic bags about 70 percent of us profess to be utterly reliant on them far more than we are on plastic food containers i'm hoping to end our love affair with plastic bags by showing singaporeans the scale of the problem can you guess how long it takes singapore to use this number of plastic bags according to the singapore environment council we take 820 million plastic bags a year just from supermarkets alone hi everybody i'm breaking that down and showing singaporeans what that looks like we have 260 plastic bags here can you guess how long it takes singapore to use this number of plastic bags about 10 days 10 days what do you think less than a day less than a day i'm gonna say about two days two days uh probably one one day yes a minute a minute not then uh two hours a few hours yeah two hours okay it takes 10 seconds as a country to use up 260 bags it took us 10 seconds it's possible for us to stop using it but i think it takes a lot of commitment 260 plastic bags in 10 seconds and that's just the ones we get from supermarkets so i thought i'd ask the group ceo of singapore's largest supermarket chain fair price what can be done [Music] i don't have a good name for this prop you know we were struggling whether to call it like the great wall of plastic i think wall shame is good there's just too much plastic while we all need a plastic bag but this is clearly too much [Music] in 2019 fair price began a trial in 25 stores to see if they can get people to use less bags by making them pay the trial ended in november 2020. i would say they're a big majority in fact 70 percent of all the shoppers supported this over this one year period about 50 million bags were saved 15 million plastic bags were saved yes were not used were not used personally i'd like to have seen fair price be bolder at the larger fair price outlets shoppers who took bags were charged 20 cents per transaction while the charge at the smaller outlets was 10 cents mind you it's per transaction not per bag [Music] so why design the trial in that way why per transaction for example well first of all we want to make it also administrative easier imagine if i have to count the number of plastic bags your trial is only at certain outlets right why not all your outlets uh maybe we'll get there but like commercially it hurts us what do your employees think about this when we implemented this some of our employees got abused thought abuse abuse yes some customers felt that it's their right they felt that this is part of the cost of doing business they paid for it we shouldn't be charged i think there were some ugly incidents fortunately this was just a minority why is fair price doing this every corporate needs to exercise their social responsibility so for that we've done it we've come out i must say i'm a little bit disappointed that the rest uh whom i thought would come along haven't come along we seem to be the only one leading this charge so i hope i really hope the rest of the players out there big and small come along how can we get there faster i don't know do you have the answer help me i'm stumped too our survey reveals that only one in four of us brings our own shopping bags when we are doing groceries fair price will extend its trial for another year which i hope will continue to make a difference but even if we did choose to go plastic free at the checkout counter the truth is disposable plastic is a problem even before we get there just look around on the shelves today almost everything in the supermarket is wrapped in plastic packaging while we do reuse the bags that we get at the checkout the same can't be said for packaging like this it's cheap it's easily contaminated it's low value the recyclers don't want it so this disposable food plastic packaging is a problem and we've got to do something about it all right what's your favorite video i've asked punggol resident perianaki and her three kids to help me find out just how difficult it is to shop plastic freak ah i need tomatoes baby yes i like meatballs plastic moment yes but everything is plastic baby you see anything there that we can take meanwhile i've sent lemon and hermap to the local wet market at pongol here items are sold by weight and without much packaging but it's lemon's first time at a wet market and she's as curious as i am to see if it's really that easy to go plastic free actually very challenging to you know go to the wet market without taking any plastic bag to be honest [Music] so this plastic box is actually from one of the kopitian that i started so i actually washed it and then keep it and then use it for this purpose let's go get the egg first yep that's the one 119. yeah this is 190 and this is 3 24 6. this is 12 for 190 right yeah 190. but because plastica yep all right because they are environmentally friendly but it's more expensive so which one would you pick that as economically friendly mommy instead of like you know those plastic those eggs that is already pre-packed we actually go go for those loose eggs and then we select those very good ones then we use the paper box instead of plastic yup okay hi how are you okay so how did you go how did things go you've got some supplies there for us this is not pasta that's good okay then this is plastic okay so eggs came in plastic some fruits came in like cardboard oh drinks milk and this was the vegetable right tomato okay so i told them that i actually don't need plastic then they were then where are you going to put your hand did they give you a discount no how did you find the supermarket challenge skanda would you change the milk that you drink just to have a brand with no plastic yeah but i don't want to change you don't want to change all right you're quite stuck on the board you can't what about you lemon you you want to go back to the wet market again uh not really every week no be very honest in terms of like pricing i'm actually quite worried so like for the midwives they would say that hey i need to weigh before i can tell you how much is the price of the meat but how do we really in the way yeah so you you like the fact that actually when you buy something it was pre-packaged and pre-labeled as it were that gives you some reassurance yes i see that's what you get from the supermarket yes but you don't quite get that from the wet market yes and of course of course the i mean it's very hot if i shop you know i need aircon too you didn't enjoy being there so that's why you hadn't been in a web market before oh yes right okay wet markets may have an edge on the packaging front but supermarkets win on convenience comfort maybe even trust so what can they do about packaging i'm back at fair price this time to speak with grace choi she oversees the supermarket chain's packaging decisions look at this grace i mean don't you think this is a little bit excessive that's a tough hearty vegetable does it really need plastic packaging here in singapore more than 90 of our products come from many parts of the world from china malaysia thailand even as far as australia new zealand or the americas so packaging actually plays a very important role in preserving the quality and freshness from the farm to the table so if you look at vegetables that are sold loose versus vegetables that are pre-packed the shelf life extends from four days all the way up to 16 days so from a food security standpoint it actually allows us to source from many other countries far away from home to make sure that we have the products that we need to feed our population but you know some of these things i can buy this loose in the wet market right they're not in plastic packaging they're fresh what's the problem why is it that they can we can do it in the wet market but in the supermarket that's a very good question so actually globally pre-covered we have started to see supermarket retailers test out offering more fresh produce loose what we have seen though is that a good 50 percent of consumers still prefer to buy the products in the package form why do they do that so particularly with kovid hygiene concerns has become you know something that consumers have been quite conscious of you wouldn't know how many people have already touched this bell pepper for example is it customers that are the problem then so actually mishandling in store does happen quite a lot when products are so loose people pick and choose you know they touch the you know product several times products are tossed around they fall to the floor and this actually leads to food wastage how much food wastage when products are sold loose we see as much as 10 to 20 percent of food being wasted and when they're packaged about two to three percent two to three percent there's up to ten times more wastage with the loose yes so so the plastic solves a food wastage problem you try to fix the food wastage problem you have a plastic problem correct spot on but what if we can go beyond plastic all together i'm about to discover some pretty futuristic and far out solutions that will shock you it's like nothing it's like there's no heat at all [Music] on my journey so far i've met ordinary people and businesses who are trying to cut down on the use of plastic here's a thought why not overturn the way we make plastic remember i told you that plastic was invented in 1869 to replace the increasingly scarce elephant ivory in billiard balls plastic was created to protect our natural world 150 years on human inventiveness has taken us full circle in our search for a sustainable alternative to plastic scientists all over the globe are now looking back at the natural world for inspiration in the uk plastic is being made from fish skin and guts in america it's mushrooms and in indonesia seaweed while in singapore oh it's like wriggly warm wet and smells of ammonia i'm here at a black soldier fly farm you might be asking why i'm told that this is part of our solution to our plastic problem shiva these are your babies absolutely a lot of them what's going on here these are not flies these are not flies these are actually the larvae of the black soldier fly okay and as they grow they shed their skin which is full of a magic material called caitine so caitine is the most naturally occurring one of the most naturally occurring polymers that could actually replace plastic applications in the real world so why black soldier flies the black soldier flies have one of the shortest life cycles in the insect world so from the time the eggs to the time they're harvested we're looking at about 23 day life cycle and that's really quick so the turnaround time is very important the other beauty about the black soldier flies is that they eat food waste so not only are we solving the plastic problem we're also potentially solving the problem of food waste that ends up in our landfills and in our incinerator i see i must also mention that the black soldier fly is native and indigenous to this part of the world so the cost of growing these farming the black soldier flies is the lowest in this part of the world i see globally i helped shiva harvest the exoskeletons that were left behind when pupae emerged as adult flies this is full of kaiten so we save it clean it up and collect it here and send it to professor william chen at ntu next door where he does his magic and makes it into plastic this is really intriguing i know that chitin is a substance called a biopolymer that's already used in the making of medicines and fertilizers but this is the first time i've heard that it can be harvested from insects and used to make plastic i've brought a box of exoskeletons to professor william chen professor william chen hi how are you professor chen has built a career combining food science and engineering still i wasn't quite prepared to see him mix the exoskeletons with banana peels and apples turns out the fruit acts as a food for microorganisms that will help ferment the exoskeletons cardiac can be isolated using chemicals machine but doing so is a lot of very energy intensive and then also produce toxic substances in the process fermentation is a in this case it's a biological way of getting chitin out of the insect exoskeleton but let me show you what we have done successfully on prong cells prawn shells are also an excellent source of chitin and this powder is chitin that has been extracted and dried from fermented prawn shells profcin tells me chitin is a versatile and strong molecule properties that make it an ideal plastic substitute to transform it into a plastic profgen mixes it in a mild acid pours the solution into a mold and lets it dry in the oven so this is your dried film product yep okay which i front oh wow so it looks like plastic it feels like plastic excellent can it be used for food sort of wrapping yeah this is what we're aiming for what we're aiming for is to not to reinvent the wheel to attack on existing manufacturing processes and to feed in the powder into the current plastic manufacturer's machine so this is this is scalable because it uses the existing manufacturing process exactly so the in a few years time we will see this plastic alternative on the supermarket itself a few years okay i'm looking forward to it compared to plastic from fossil fuels the film i'm holding in my hand is a much more sustainable material and thanks to the use of fermentation this option is much less carbon intensive much more climate friendly i really hope that professor trent's invention takes off here but what struck me was his point that this needs to be easy for manufacturers to adopt and scale up because at the end of the day for great ideas to make it to market you need industry on your side it's the same principle with recycling when global oil prices are so low and it costs so little to make new plastic if you've invented a way to recycle plastic waste then you've got to find a way to really sell your case and that's exactly what professor duong haimin has done here at the national university of singapore he's discovered how to transform cheap and plentiful plastic drink bottles into a truly profitable product a process that begins by shredding plastic bottles into a fine thread [Music] where are we going welcome to my kitchen your kitchen okay [Music] in his lab or kitchen professor duong mixes the shredded plastic with a chemical solution and freeze dries them overnight at minus 35 degrees celsius the result is an ultra lightweight and highly absorbent material called an aerogel oh so this is aerogel okay it feels like a piece of fabric but it's very light yes almost like a piece of felt but you can still see some of the fibers coming off it the people they don't want to recycle the plastic way because they don't believe the value of the raw material so i believe in the raw material converts them into the aerogel they have got a very high value for the multi-billion dollar application market as well what value is a cloth like this one of the major application is will be for the oil spill cleaning [Music] so we are going to pour about the mortar oil now this is the aero gel we usually coat it with the water repellent okay so you can see this one we put it on the top yeah this one here we just leave this for about 15 seconds okay yeah so that that is how we look like so you can see i'm going to turn over about this one as well yeah wow so you can see wow there's no ha oh it's look at the top of the water so all the oil has come up into the aerogel aerogels are widely used to clean up industrial oil spills prof duong zero gels made from plastic bottles are seven times more absorbent than commercial alternatives made from silica and the best part because it's so simple to make they are ten times cheaper to produce and result in a lower carbon footprint goodness look at that yes why are we going outside we're going to play with fire play with fire okay so the bottom is burning it's burning the temperature is about 500 degrees c what's working now put on the top of this try to put my hand on top of this one yes huh it's like nothing it's like there's no heat at all is it so it's 500 degrees underneath yeah and the top of this one will be about 32 degrees it feels like the same aerogels don't just mop up oil spills they are also great as heat insulation i'm excited to see the uses that the plastic from pt bottles can be put to as a result of professor don's research but there's another thing that pet can be recycled into clothes let it go throughout the filming of this show i've been wearing an entire wardrobe made with believe it or not recycled pet bottles let it go this shirt is 12 pet bottles this shirt is 20 pt bottles even my shoes have recycled plastic in them the seven pt bottles in this pair this is a small answer to a big problem but just like professor don's decision to focus on high value aerogels if fashion can create a market for recycled plastics it's a start and a market can only take off if there's demand for the past four weeks food delivery company grab has been testing its customers appetite for plastic free eco packaging turns out 25 wanted it even if it meant paying an extra 30 cents for every piece of packaging it's encouraging though i do wish it was higher but if there's anything i've learned it is that our behavior is not set in stone think about how we now instinctively wear a face mask when we leave the house or how we step to one side on the escalator all without a second thought we can be persuaded motivated even compelled to do the right thing and when it comes to plastic we really need that push we really need to do this reduce consumption invest in new technologies pressure our businesses and if it comes to it be prepared to pay a price for our future i think it's worth the [Music] fight you

Channel: CNA Insider

Views: 26,770

Keywords: CNA, CNA Insider, Channel NewsAsia, Asian perspective, Climate Change: A Wicked Problem, climate change, environment, sustainability, global warming, plastic, Singapore, Janil Puthucheary, plastic waste, single-use plastic, innovation, pollution, microplastics, recycling, plastic bags, plastic alternative, aerogel

Id: gbzm31Kjbxs

Length: 48min 3sec (2883 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 19 2021