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It’s Time to Clean Up

Plastic pollution has gotten far out of hand. To add to the obvious large plastic pollutants found almost anywhere on earth, over time, other plastics have been torn apart and shredded into miniscule particulates—and these little particulates have gotten everywhere, from the deepest parts of the ocean, to the tallest cliffs of Everest (Gramling, Apr. 15, 2019). And really it’s no wonder: plastic has been playing an increasingly integral role in human life since PVC was first polymerized in the 1830s (PlasticsEurope.com, 2020), production ramped up drastically in the early 1900s with the synthesis of Bakelite, and production was again significantly ramped up shortly after WW2. Current estimates suggest that around “8.3 billion tonnes of plastic have been created by humans since the early 1950s” (Cole, July 24, 2017)—and save for a couple of minor dips thanks to the odd economic recession, the rates of production don’t seem to be going down at all (Ritchie & Roser, 2018).

Geyer et al., 2017

Recycling rates have looked equally dismal, especially since prior to the 1980s, plastic generally was not recycled at all, and the volume of plastic incinerated significantly outweighs the volume that has been recycled, even with increased plastic management efforts. In 2015, only about 20% of plastic waste was recycled, about 25% was incinerated, and about 55% was just discarded (Ritchie & Roser, 2018).

Geyer et al., 2017

Plastic particles get continuously dispersed across the globe in a myriad of ways. While the vast majority of it is still just discarded and left to the winds of time to be shredded and spread out, incineration causes a number of issues as well by creating noxious toxins that eat away slowly at our atmosphere. “Burning plastic and other wastes releases dangerous substances such as heavy metals, Persistent Organic Pollutants, and other toxics into the air and ash waste residues” (No-burn.org, 2020). New incinerator technologies are also having similar problems, as time and time again, technologies such as gasification, pyrolysis and plasma arcing (while producing a meagre energy output) are also exorbitantly expensive on top of merely harvesting the last drops of energy from this damaging refuse (No-burn.org, 2020).

While recycling plastic is a step in the right direction, it isn’t a perfect solution, either. Almost all plastic products are imprinted with one of seven resin codes, which are used by the plastics industry to indicate the general type of chemical compound used to make the product. But while these resin codes can help plastics producers to easier sort and recycle various types of plastics, there are ultimately thousands of different chemical mixtures used to create the various products we all use every day. These codes, while useful for plastics producers, are generally useless for recycling, as they were never intended to be any type of guarantee that any plastic product bearing any given code can be accepted for recycling. In fact, the term “recycling” is in itself a misnomer, and according to Eureka! Recycling the term could be more accurately stated as “downcycling” since there is always some degree of irrecoverable waste created by the current process (2020).

Eureka! Recycling, 2020

Let’s talk about solutions. Despite the inefficiencies, recycling still creates a more positive outcome than discarding or incinerating. But the best thing that everybody can do to reduce the negative impact of plastic use on our environment is to just use less plastic. Reducing the amount of plastic that you use reduces the demand for it, and that can reduce the amount produced in the first place. But despite that optimistic view, plastic management is still a serious problem that we will have to tackle sooner rather than later. Solutions must be made in order to wean our society off of its dependency on plastics, and we also need to find ways to safely and sustainably deal with the plastic that has already been produced. We all must keep recycling, improve recycling practices, and find more sustainable means of replacing plastics everywhere.

Plastic is everywhere. It’s time we cleaned up our mess. We need to find ourselves a better way.