Guernsey’s food retailers, including takeaways, are being urged to stop using plastic packaging to help reduce the amount of rubbish found in St Peter Port’s harbour.
The call comes on World Wetlands Day where the theme this year is “wetlands for a sustainable urban future”.
The government’s biodiversity officer is reminding islanders that the harbour is arguably Guernsey’s most notable urban wetland, warning that the devastating impact of marine litter on water quality and wildlife are now well documented, and urban wetlands like St Peter Port harbour are not immune to the threat.
Each day during the summer, Victoria Marina is cleared of floating debris. Half a bin sack of litter is collected from the Harbour every day, amounting to almost 200 bin sacks each year.
Julia Henney, Biodiversity Education Officer, said: “Often when we talk about plastic pollution in our oceans, the plastic has originated from elsewhere and is washing up on our shores. When we look at pollution in St Peter Port harbour, however, we can see that the litter has originated directly from the surrounding area, so this means it is much easier for us to take action to prevent it.”
Laura Bampton from the marine biology section at La Societe Guernesiaise said: “World Wetlands Day provides us with a fantastic opportunity to celebrate our beautiful Ramsar sites and our entire coastal environment, including St Peter Port Harbour. It also acts as a wakeup call. We must ask ourselves: are we happy to live in a world where there is more plastic than fish in the oceans, where seabirds starve to death with stomachs full of litter, and where marine mammals are unable to breed due to feeding on prey containing dangerous levels of toxic chemicals, associated with plastic litter? Nobody could truthfully answer ‘yes’ to this question. While this is a scary scenario to consider, we are fortunate in that we have the power to prevent it.”
