I AM very proud of my daughter, Olivia, (while reserving the right to disagree with her totally on some subjects), who set herself the task of going plastic-free this year. She’s an artistic environmentalist with NGO Invisible Dust and was without a doubt sitting on my shoulder when I spoke to the 500 or so people attending the brilliantly organised Plastic Unwrapped Festival in Malmesbury on Saturday.

It was Sir David Attenborough’s truly iconic Blue Planet 2 which more or less overnight changed our attitude to plastic, or at least to single-use, and therefore un-recyclable, plastic.

Who can forget the picture of that Wandering Albatross chick on the beach dead with her stomach full of cotton buds, fishing nets and plastic cups? Or last week the whale dead with 400 plastic cups and a pair of flip-flops in his belly. Who can fail to emote over turtles choking on plastic bags believing them to be jellyfish? We know that we just have to do something about the 12 million tonnes of plastics entering our oceans every year. So what can we do?

There are three levels. Each and every one of us can make our contribution by consciously trying to cut single use plastics out of our lives. Follow Olivia and the 500 people in Malmesbury on Saturday and the countless thousands across Britain who agree.

Second, the Government has to act, and has promised to do so. Our 25-year plan for the environment ‘A Green Future’ lays out detailed promises to tackle marine litter, to cut reliance on plastics, for example by bringing in the 5p levy on plastic bags, which has cut their use by some 86 per cent. We have banned cotton buds, plastic straws and stirrers, and are moving towards banning SUP plastic coffee cups.

We have banned the sale of products with microbeads (but have to do more to tackle what the Prince of Wales called our ‘Throwaway Society’, especially in the fashion industry.) And despite the fact that we are already well ahead of targets, we must further increase recycling and composting of plastics.

And third, we must persuade the rest of the world to follow our lead. After all, 90 per cent of the plastic in our oceans comes from seven rivers in Asia. We must lead then by example and diplomatic and aid pressure.

If we act and act now –personally, locally, nationally and internationally, we can and we must defeat what is becoming a vast environmental scourge of our times.