In order to minimise and ultimately prevent further pollution of the marine environment, European Bioplastics:
- considers the full implementation of EU waste legislation and an increase in the efficiency of waste management crucial;
- supports the gradual phase-out of landfilling for plastic products in Europe and appropriate measures to expand recycling and recovery of plastic waste;
- demands stricter measures to combat littering, for example through fines, and supports more and better education about littering, which is often linked to a lack of information about the environmental consequences;
- calls for more research into biodegradation behaviour of materials and applications within marine environments
- supports the establishment of standards, in order to determine applications that are likely to end up in marine environments, making marine biodegradability justified and necessary.
Littering should not be accepted as an unfortunate but inevitable fact for any kind of waste, neither on land nor at sea – including all varieties of plastics.