Carrie Symonds is the UK Prime Minister’s fiancee as most of the world knows. Most of the world also knows that she and Boris Johnson have a child whose name is Wilf. During the coronavirus lockdown in the UK, like the rest of the world, she was obliged to purchase items for Wilf from Amazon. Apparently she was aghast at the amount of plastic packaging employed by that mega business. She came to realise this, as have other people, because of coronavirus. There are some benefits to this horrible pandemic.
Carrie Symonds used her popular Twitter feed to cajole Amazon into developing the will and commitment to reduce plastic packaging to help protect the oceans and the environment. They have the technical ability at their fulfilment centres to reduce plastic. Presently, they do not have the will to do it.
Carrie Symonds is employed or works voluntarily for an organisation called Oceana as a senior adviser. A survey commissioned by Oceana found that 71% of British consumers wanted major online retailers such as Amazon to offer a plastic-free packaging option according to The Times newspaper. Fifty-one percent said that they would shop elsewhere to avoid plastic packaging.
We are told that Jeff Bezos and Amazon are passionate about meeting the needs of their customers. No doubt he means with respect to the provision of the items that they desire to buy and possess. They seem less passionate about protecting the environment. I know that in the past there has been concern about the amount of cardboard used to package items particularly small products surrounded by acres of cardboard. More waste but plastic pollutes. Plastic can be found anywhere on the planet even the most remote places such as the bottom of the deepest trench in the oceans. You will find plastic particles in their millions on a bog in Scotland that nobody has visited. Or, they say, but it rains a thousand tonnes of plastic particles on Yosemite National Park in the USA every year. Yes, rains!
A YouGov survey of 2,200 adults found that 94% of Amazon’s British customers were concerned or very concerned about plastic pollution and its impact on the oceans as highlighted by Sir David Attenborough. David brought to us, the masses, the enlightenment that we needed about the horrendous pollution by people of the oceans through their profligate usage of plastics, particularly plastic packaging which is discarded in vast quantities amounting to billions of tonnes annually. Who can forget that amazing photograph of a seagull feeding her young with plastic particles thinking that it was food? That really did hit the spot when it comes to horror stories regarding plastic.
