World Oceans Day: why saving our planet starts with the right emojis

A new campaign wants to ban the plastic cup and straw emoji 
Ban the plastic cup to save the whales
Emojipedia

It's not just the oceans filling up with plastic; your inbox, iMessages and social media feeds are polluted too. In a bid to reverse the normalisation of single-use plastic, Sky Ocean Rescue has launched an appeal to ban the plastic cup and straw emoji from the keyboard.

Ahead of World Oceans Day tomorrow, the anti-waste campaign group has launched the #PassOnPlasticEmoji petition to have the symbols removed by Unicode, the official emoji body.

“We are increasingly bombarded with normalised images of single-use plastic in popular culture, and now it’s even infiltrating the global language of emojis and social media — with people reporting seeing plastic emojis every week,” says Fiona Morgan, head of inspiring action at Sky Ocean Rescue.

Most types of plastic are not biodegradable. They can stay in the ocean for centuries, and the ramifications of this are well established. Microplastics have been found inside a third of fish in the English Channel.

But plastic waste isn’t simply an environmental problem; it’s a cultural issue too. This underlines the importance of image. If the airing of the BBC’s Blue Planet II was a jolt to the public’s sensibilities, the prevalence of ads and imagery that normalise plastic remains a fundamental issue.

In a survey by TalkTalk Mobile, 72 per cent of 18 to 25-year-olds said they found it easier to put their feelings across in emojis than in text. Meanwhile, 60 million emojis are shared on Facebook each day.

“Any move that attempts to address the everyday exposure of children and adults to normalise plastic use is to be applauded,” says Richard Harrington, a marine biologist at the Marine Conservation Society and co-author of How to Live Plastic Free.

“There are younger people who have never seen animals in a rock pool, while plastic has become a part of their vocabulary. We want them to know that natural is the norm, and plastic is the interloper.”

“Plastic” was this week declared the children’s word of the year by Oxford University Press after analysis of stories submitted by five to 13-year-olds in a competition.

The word appeared 3,359 times in the 134,790 stories submitted — up 100 per cent from last year.

At the same time, the natural world’s vernacular has declined substantially. In one paper, Cambridge researchers found children aged eight and over were “substantially better” at identifying Pokémon “species” than “organisms such as oak trees or badgers”: about 80 per cent accuracy for Pokémon, but less than 50 per cent for real species.

For weasel read Weedle, for badger read Bulbasaur — and this was before the launch of Pokémon Go.

“As parents reading stories about plastic and the oceans, we often think about what we can do for our children but we can think about what the children can do, too,” says Harrington. “They can make their own breakfast, avoiding plastic packets, or pack their children’s lunch boxes in reusable containers rather than buying snacks packaged in single-use plastic.”

Emoji is a language of its own, but the language has precluded talk about the environment — there are no emoji about pollution or rising sea levels. The Climoji sticker set for Android and iPhone, released by artists Marina Zurkow and Viniyata Pany, introduced some, including a dead fish in a plastic bottle and a whale with plastic in its belly.

Climoji wants to raise awareness of climate change using emoji
Climoji

“We’ve all become plastic addicts — it’s all over our food, drinks, clothes, new tech and it’s even now on the emoji keyboard. Because of this, people aren’t thinking twice about adding it into our texts and WhatsApps,” continues Morgan.

“Removing the plastic cup with straw emoji is just one small change we can make. We want to inspire simple, everyday changes to stop our oceans from drowning in plastic because we can all make a difference.”

Start small, think big — and #PassOnPlastic.

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