The European Parliament yesterday, by an overwhelming majority, backed a major crackdown on the scourge of plastic pollution, in particular cracking down on single use plastics - banning   items such as plates, cutlery, straws, balloon sticks and cotton buds, which account for over 70% of marine litter by 2021.

The European Parliament has also agreed on measures that cover waste from tobacco products, in particular cigarette filters containing plastic, which would have to be reduced by 50 per cent by 2025 and 80 per cent by 2030.

Several other plastic pollutants are in the crosshairs in the pans approved yesterday, but there is still a long way to go and little Malta, if we put our minds and mettle to it, can serve as a shining example.

The plan, if approved by the bloc's member states, is expected avoid 3.4 million tonnes of carbon emissions, prevent damage to the environment that would cost the equivalent of €22 billion by 2030 and actually save consumers some €6.5 billion.

But we do not necessarily need to wait for the EU on this one. Malta could be a real trendsetter if we were to implement that zero single-use plastic waste policy ourselves before being forced into it by the EU.

It can never be stressed enough how the scourge of rubbish plaguing Malta's streets and open spaces is a matter of dire concern, and one that impinges, perhaps more than any other matter, directly on residents' visible quality of life.

Rubbish on the islands is omnipresent and all-pervasive, it is literally everywhere you look from city streets to village lanes, and from the countryside to the roadsides, and the closer one looks, the more one sees.

While it is all well and good to crack down on those unscrupulous individuals dumping waste in valleys and anywhere else on the island where they think they can get away with it, it is also the small time contravener - the person who throws an empty packet out of their car window or who drops their wrappers or straws onto the street without a second thought - that really adds up.

In fact, Malta could go a step further.  Here is one way that Malta could truly be the best in Europe: being a small country, we are that much more agile, and change can be enacted quicker than other larger, more lumbering economies.

And with the plastic menace threatening the world's oceans and seas in an unprecedented manner, we in Malta have an extra onus as we are right smack in the middle of the sea and our plastic waste is all the more likely to end up in the sea.

One such initiative will be taken further today in the form of a second Seabin - a device that can filter up to 25,000 litres of seawater an hour and catch up to 1.5 kilograms of marine debris a day - which being installed at the Grand Harbour Marina in Vittoriosa, following a similar initiative in Pieta.

It is understood that the area's businesses are sponsoring the device which, apart from the positive public relations the initiative promises to garner those companies, also helps the locality in which they operate.

This corporate social responsibility initiative, if replicated across the country, holds great potential to help clean up our seas.  But at the end of the day, the problem really needs to be tackled at source and that lies in the hands of each and every one of in how we choose the plastics that we use or don't use, and what we do with it after use.