It's no secret that plastic has become ubiquitous in our daily lives.
From packaging to electronics, plastic is absolutely everywhere.
Sure, plastics have undoubtedly made our lives more convenient, but the convenience comes at a significant cost to our environment and health. Plastics can take hundreds of years to break down, which means that much of the plastic we've ever produced since it was invented still exists in some form today.
The myth of plastic recycling
But what about recycled plastics, you may ask?
The harsh truth is that most of the plastic we produce ends up straight to landfill (see e.g. this piece of research, or this one). In fact, it is estimated that only 9% of the world's plastic waste gets recycled.
What this means is that most of the world's plastic waste gets either incinerated, landfilled or mismanaged. The latter is particularly problematic because such waste can leach harmful chemicals into the soil and water, break into microplastics, release GHGs when incinerated, end up in oceans (either killing or being eaten by the fishes we then consume) and so on.
And that’s not it!
While most plastics aren’t recycled and end up poisoning the environment in one way or another, producing these plastics also has a very negative impact on the environment. Plastics are made from raw materials (e.g. oil) via an energy hungry manufacturing process.
So, to summarize:
Manufacturing plastics pollutes (a lot)
Once used, plastics pollute (a lot - again)
What can we do about plastic waste?
Reduce our plastics consumption. And this can be easier than you think!
For instance, if you are lucky enough to live in cities like London, Paris etc, with high quality water on the tap, next time you go groceries shopping, ask yourself: “Is that really worth buying this water bottle today? Is that really worth buying this water wrapped in plastics that will pollute for 100s years and take 10 min to drink, while I have good quality water on the tap for a fraction of the cost?”
The answer is: Probably not.
A similar reasoning can be followed in many other contexts.
For instance:
Avoid buying fruits and veggies wrapped in plastic packaging if you can easily buy a bulk alternative,
Find a zerowaste shop in your local area (pro tip: use the Ganddee app to do so easily) and buy rice, beans and pasta plastic-free using reusable containers
Reduce your consumption of polyester clothes. Polyester is a form of plastic that releases a lot of microplastics in the environment, especially when you wash your clothes.
We are what we consume, and we consume what we harvest from our environment.
So, if we eat and live in plastics, will we become plastic dolls?
If you want to visualize the amount of microplastic you eat, look at this article - it's truly enlightening.
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