5 reasons why plastic waste has become such a big problem

Here at Bower Collective, our core mission is to help our customers eliminate plastic waste and create a more sustainable world. 

We know how important it is to people these days to go plastic free and do as much as they can to eliminate plastic waste from their homes. In fact, a recent global survey by the consultancy Deloitte found that 67% of consumers rated eliminating plastic waste as their number one concern. 

Here at Team Bower we are all over the data, and we wanted to share with you  our top 5 reasons why plastic waste has become such a MASSIVE problem in today’s world - and, critically, what we can do about it! 

1. Plastic packaging is incredibly cheap to produce: since the Second World war, petrochemical companies, multinationals and the advertising industry have trained us to think that single use and disposability is a good thing. It’s cheap, repeatable and once the customer has thrown it away, it’s someone else’s problem.
2. Single use plastic still dominates the market: Last year 370 million tons of plastic were produced, 50% of which were designed to be used once and thrown away! This is scandalous. 
3. Recycling is broken: unfortunately, of all the plastic waste that you carefully sort into your recycling bins for collection, less than 10% of it ever gets properly recycled (as low as 5% in the USA). We can no longer rely on the system to work and need to find better solutions. Most of it is incinerated, exported or sent to landfill. 
4. Plastic waste has been found at the summit of Everest and the bottom of the Mariana Trench: what more do you need to know, microplastic pollution is so bad now that there is not a square inch of the planet that hasn’t been impacted. 
5. Microplastics are now in the food chain and our internal organs: a recent 2022 environmental study by a Dutch healthcare group found microplastic pollution in the blood of 80% of the people in their sample test group - an alarming statistic of how plastic waste is now a human health crisis too. 

All in all a pretty gloomy analysis! But - all is not lost, we can turn this around if we all work together to push towards a plastic waste free world. Remember the ‘waste hierarchy’ - which says that reduce and reuse are the two most effective things you can do to reduce waste. 

Here at Bower, we guarantee that if you shop with us, zero plastic waste comes out of your home. You send your refill packs back to us in the freepost envelopes we provide for reuse and responsible recycling. We are leading the charge in the refill revolution with a number of other brands who know there is a better way that eliminates waste and still delivers what people need.