By Heather Suttie

PLASTIC is something I’ve been passionate about for a very long time. In 2007 I set up a campaign called Say No To Plastic highlighting the negative effects of plastic on the environment. I built a website, filled it with stats, shared thousands of pictures of plastic bags which I encountered on thrice-daily dog walks and did my best to showcase alternative solutions.

It was a hit; more than 10,000 Scots signed my petition, and I was recognised by the Scottish Government for my achievements in being instrumental with the introduction of the 5p plastic bag charge in 2014.

My own personal war on plastic was also amplified in 2019 when I took up a corporate social responsibility project to spearhead an awareness campaign highlighting the damaging effects of contact lens pollution; yes, single-use plastic contact lenses are contributing to pollution when they’re flushed down the sink or loo, and people still do it.

Plastic is everywhere, a report in 2019, commissioned in by the WWF found that an average person now eats the equivalent of a credit card's worth of plastic in a week. If this doesn’t make you choke, I don’t know what will.

I was involved with a study undertaken by Manchester University in 2020 titled catchily "Unflushables: designing new intervention pathways for sewer blockages and environmental pollution in the Anglian Water region, UK". It’s 60 pages of findings and recommendations which you can Google at your leisure.

It’s now 2022, 15 years after my campaign began and though the conversations are more frequent and intentions made clearer and louder, it's action that is required – which is why I’m supporting Scottish Water’s Nature Calls campaign in calling for a ban on plastic wipes. Scotland should take the lead on this.

11 billion wet wipes are sold in the UK and 90 per cent of these contain plastic and take 100-plus years to degrade, leaving behind microplastics.

Single-use plastic are also behind 93% of sewer-clogging fatbergs, costing the taxpayer millions of pounds a year, and are the third most common marine litter item in the UK.

In March, this year Tesco, the UK’s biggest seller of baby wipes made the decision to stop selling branded baby wipes containing plastic. This is a significant move: Tesco sells more than 75 million packs or 4.8 billion individual baby wipes each year.

There are alternatives out there and we as consumers can influence change by how we spend our money. Plastic wet wipes cause so much damage (google a fatberg ) which costs companies like Scottish Water millions each year, and most importantly it’s costing the earth. In my view, there’s no excuse for single-use plastic wipes.

Heather Suttie is co-MD at Medio – but being an environmentalist isn’t a job it’s a way of life