The Problem With....Plastic

According to the UK group Waste Online the annual global production of plastic is around 100 million tonnes per year. When combined with the energy required to extract and process the oil to make raw plastic pellets this is equivalent to about 200 million tonnes of oil; or about 4% of the world’s annual oil production. Although this is a large amount of raw material, when compared to aluminium, a product with many of the more useful properties of plastic – durability, lightness, flexibility – it is a mere stripling. Aluminium requires 4 tonnes of bauxite to produce one tonne of base metal, and vastly more energy than plastics require. It is also worth bearing in mind that for every tonne of oil required to make the plastic, only half of that will be emitted as carbon dioxide; the rest is locked away in the plastic for hundreds of years.
So that doesn’t seem to be the problem with plastic.
The durability of plastic, though, leads to another issue. Litter is a nuisance; it clogs up streets and waterways, it spreads itself around wild areas, it can trap wildlife, causing pain and death, notably through choking and garrotting. Because plastic is so durable it persists far longer than most other forms of litter. A thin plastic carrier bag will last for anything from 20 to 1000 years; a drainpipe or child’s toy, probably longer – and we will not know exactly how long until far in the future, by which time much of our planet will surely be choking on plastic waste. But plastic is also inert and can be easily tidied up and contained. Heavy metals, toxic chemical sludge, fertilisers, all of which poison soil and water, cannot be so easily contained as plastic. Even simple kitchen and garden waste will break down quickly to form carbon dioxide and methane. Plastic does none of this so quickly and so damagingly. And most types of plastic can be recycled with great efficiency, reducing the use of raw materials in the long run.
So that doesn’t seem to be the problem with plastic.
When the British supermarket chain Sainsburys announced that they would be cutting their use of oil based plastics and promoting compostable materials instead, Sainsburys were rightly given praise for their efforts in reducing landfill. What they failed to do was point out that, rather than significantly reduce the amount of packaging used on their goods, some would be replaced by biodegradable materials, and the majority would be untouched by this policy. In both of the previous “problems” with plastic it is not the nature of plastic that is the real issue, but the sheer quantity of, and the dependency we have on, the plastics we use.
The Problem With Plastic is that is has made the disposable economy possible. Much of the modern world is addicted to the very things that plastic is good at being, and as a consequence we are just consuming too much of everything that is related to plastic.
Take a conventional television, for example. The tube is made from glass – it has to be – and there are a large number of micro-electronic components within it, but the majority of what makes up the television itself is plastic. In 2000 there were 243 million televisions in the USA, 1 for every 1.2 people.