The state of plastic

Everyone thinks plastic is bad for the environment. Because, as we use it today, it is. Plastic is filling our landfills, clogging our waterways, its microplastics are seeping into our water, food, and even our bodies. 

Plastic as a material has allowed us to create new realms of products, which coincidentally led to a short-term-thinking consumerist era, where products are made and bought cheaply, only to be thrown away quickly. Traditionally we have used plastic as a filler material, any part or product that cannot be easily made with wood, glass or metal can usually be done cheaper and more customizable with plastics. Even worse is single-use plastic, designed only to be used once for a short period by a consumer, who then throws it away and it goes straight to a landfill. This is not to say all plastic is bad, there are fields that we have made incredible advances in, in no small part thanks to plastics such as healthcare,  medicine, & electronics. A lot of the advancements made in these fields would not have been possible if not for plastic. These advancements were also made at a time when we didn’t know the scale of consequences that producing plastics would have for the environment. 

We know more now. Today we have the information to know what plastics are doing to our environment. We know that we are killing our planet in no small part due to the burning of fossil fuels for the production of oil, gas & plastic. In fact, in 2015 plastic production from fossil fuels accounted for 15% of the global carbon budget ( the amount of greenhouse gas emissions to keep warming within the Paris Agreement goals) at 1.7 Gigatonnes of Co2. (Plastic Pollution on Course to Double by 2030, 2021). We know that the things that get produced are ending up in landfills, which is to say, moved out of our line of sight to make us feel better. We have known all of this for decades now but yet nothing has changed. This is especially hard to hear because, in today's day and age, we can easily replace these with biodegradable or infinitely reusable options, such as PDK plastic, Mycelium, Compostable PLA, or fully biodegradable PHA bioplastic. 

Unfortunately, we add certain things to the original plastic in the production process, which bond with the raw plastic material making it virtually impossible to separate and get the raw material back to be used again. These are chemical additives to alter the color, texture, durability, flexibility & heat resistance of a plastic.(Franklin-Cheung, 2023) 

The plastic production process was never designed with reuse in mind, from the start it has been virtually impossible to recycle plastics due to these additives. They bond with the hydrocarbon polymers that make up plastic and cannot be separated again. 

Even the few plastics that do get recycled, rarely get recycled more than once. When they do get recycled it's not fully cyclical either. Take a PET bottle for example, PET plastic gets recycled more than any other at 20.9% -still shockingly low - (Greenpeace, 2022). When a PET bottle gets recycled, it is melted down and then usually mixed with brand-new plastic material to bridge the gap in quality that comes from reusing the material. 

This is not a full solution but it fixes half of the problem with plastic production and that is the need to continually produce more & more because they get used and then go to a landfill. This process would allow for the plastics to be produced only once, then be reused over and over. 

Compostable is not the same as biodegradable, A major drawback of this material is that while it is compostable, it will not decompose in nature, only in a commercial composter, because it needs to be heated to ~60C/140F and fed special microbes to break it down. Because these conditions don't occur in nature, if this plastic ends up anywhere besides a commercial composter it will take anywhere from 100-1000 years to break down. (Lang, 2022)

We can reuse materials such as metals and plastics infinitely if we produce & reuse them correctly, keeping them clean of any additives that are not removable. We can work with nature to create other products, using plants as biodegradable building materials, that when we are done with, we can return to nature and give back its nutrients to the environment. 

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