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Ironically, the first industrial plastic, called celluloid, was hailed as a saviour of the environment. Its invention in the 1860s meant that thousands of elephants, whose ivory tusks had been used to make billiard balls (billiards was very, very popular), were saved from slaughter. Hawksbill turtles, whose shells were turned into tortoiseshell combs, also benefitted… And later on, modern plastics began to play an important role in medicine, helping to save millions of lives.
However, a lot of modern plastic is single-use stuff that we don’t really need. For example, in 2018 we generated 5.2 million tonnes of plastic waste * in the UK, including:
13 billion plastic bottles
2 billion straws
16.5 billion pieces of plastic cutlery
2.5 billion coffee cups, and
2.1 billion plastic bags…
That’s just the UK. Globally, an estimated 400 million tons of plastic is disposed of every year, with less than 10% of it being recycled. The rest breaks down in the environment, creating ‘microplastics’.
Microplastics are plastic particles less than five millimetres across. They are in the air we breathe, in the food and drink we consume, and in our homes: a recent study in Australia found that 39% of indoor dust particles were microplastics, mainly shed by clothes, furnishings, and food packaging.
We know that microplastics have reached remote places such as the Arctic and the Mariana Trench – that’s the world’s deepest ocean trench, with an estimated maximum depth of 11,034m (for scale, the world’s highest mountain, Everest, has been measured at 8,848.86m).
Microplastics have also been found in human blood, and they can travel around the body and may lodge in organs. We don’t know much about the effect of microplastics on our health at the moment, but it is unlikely to be beneficial – and we have just discovered that these tiny particles can cross the blood-brain barrier…
It’s not all bad news. In March 2021, 175 members of the United Nations agreed, for the first time, to forge an international treaty to tackle plastic pollution, and it was reported earlier this year that scientists have developed a new enzyme that can completely break down waste plastic in under 24 hours.
There are things we can do, too – taking action, especially collectively, is a good way to calm our eco-anxiety. And remember, every little helps. Environmental change depends on all of us doing as well as we can to reduce our plastic waste, rather than on a few individuals being eco-perfectionists. For more information about plastic pollution, and what you can do to combat it, go to:
https://theplasticfreehome.com/
*Figures from the Environmental Investigation Agency – https://eia-international.org/