Parrot “Svitz” and colleagues support World Cleanup Day 2019

In Svitzer Angola, our team has a pet parrot called “Svitz”. On Saturday 21 September, he joined a team of dedicated linesmen in their quest to collect plastic waste in support of World Cleanup day 2019.

Svitzer, 23.09.19 – The environmentally engaged parrot and the linesmen in Svitzer Angola were not alone on Saturday 21 September. Across Svitzer’s four regions, hundreds of colleagues teamed up to take action, join the global cleanup movement and start doing something about the devastating piles of trash and plastic that end up in the ports and on the nearby beaches where we operate.

Each year, an estimated 8-10 million tons of plastic waste ends up in the world’s oceans and by 2050 there will be more plastic in the oceans than there are fish. As global marine services provider and employer, we believe we have a major responsibility to preserve and protect the environment in which we operate, and we want to live up to this responsibility by doing what we can to #refuse, #reduce, #remove and #reuse plastic. As a global company and as teams and individuals.

Recently we have launched an internal We Fight Plastic initiative to, over time, fundamentally change the way we deal with plastic as a company. We call it Turning the Tide on Plastic. As a first step, we work to understand and map our current plastic consumption and assess how much plastic waste we produce across our fleet and offices. With that overview in hand, we then aim to set ambitious targets and start changing our own behaviours as well as influence vendors and partners across our industry.

It is an exciting initiative that requires commitment and will evolve over time – luckily people are not sitting on their hands waiting for the results. Many of them take action and initiatives to refuse, reduce, remove and reuse plastic are already happening in all parts of Svitzer. Like we saw it on Saturday.

Thank you to everyone who participated in World Cleanup Day.

WorldCleanupDay2019 #WeFightPlastic #IAmOnBoard #maersk #svitzer #plastic