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The costs of plastics

Some of this essay is taken from an excellent article by Juan Baztan. His article concentrates on the various costs of plastics pollution. https://theconversation.com/plastic-pollution-why-doing-nothing-will-cost-us-far-more-than-taking-action-244360?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-gb

“When you buy a bottle of Coca-Cola or a Snickers bar, the price probably doesn’t break the bank. But what if the true cost of the plastic packaging is taken into account at the supermarket checkout? Say, for example, the cost to clean up the pollution from making that plastic, or the cost to manage the packaging when you throw it away? Or even the medical bills that rack up from human health threats connected with plastics? And let’s not forget the cost of damages inflicted on terrestrial and marine life, along with entire ecosystems. That receipt would be a mile long.” (Baztan)

It is so easy for us for to pretend that plastics are not a problem. This is specially true of ‘single-use plastics’ like packaging or disposable cups, that we throw away to be taken by the binmen. Plastics are wonder materials that, used thoughtfully, allow things to be designed and made that are otherwise difficult. Examples are window frames, the interiors of cars, food storage containers, fabrics such as cotton that don’t deplete the water supply in dry countries, the keyboard and mouse that I am using, etc.

There is a vast number of different plastics. Some are transparent, some flexible, some very hard and strong, some can be remelted, some re-used. They have one thing in common. They are nearly all made from oil or gas and most cannot be recycled. Look at the picture that your rubbish collector has given you. Of the seven numbered types shown only two can normally be recycled. Even those are sometimes rendered unusable by being too mucky to be cleaned. Only up to about 14% of all plastics sent for recycling are in fact recycled (see diagram below).

So what happens to the rest? The large, hard things are dumped on landfill tips, either here or abroad. They will stay there for ever unless they break down over tens or hundreds of years. Some are burned to produce heat or electricity but that throws often dangerous pollution into the air. The ‘recyclable’ plastics that are not processed here are packed into shipping containers and sent to the Far East or Africa. A common scenario is that poor people hand sort the plastics for genuine recycling, and the rest is either put into landfill, dumped into rivers or the sea, burned often at risk to people’s health, or returned to us in the same containers for us to dump.

Plastics don’t rot like natural materials because no fungi or bacteria have evolved that can do it. At least not yet as you will see. Many do break up into ever smaller particles, called macro-, micro- and nano-plastics. These can be breathed in, drunk in our water supply or eaten in vegetable food stuffs or wild animals and fish that have themselves absorbed them. They are therefore present in us in increasing quantities and, though it is too soon to know for sure what illnesses they cause, there are indications of heart problems, hormones, some cancers, gene switching, endometriosis, male fertility and breathing difficulties like asthma.

 From https://oceanblueproject.org/harmful-effects-of-plastic-on-human-health/is

Here are some solutions

First: Stop using plastics for some things and use metal or glass instead. The additional energy and financial costs of production must be cancelled out by re-using them.

Second: Start making plastics from natural, growing materials such as cellulose that will rot.

Third: Develop bacteria that will rot the plastics. They appear to be developing naturally by evolutionary pressure.

Fourth: For essential uses such as medical ones, only allow plastics that can genuinely be re-used.

Fifth: Find some way to get the super-rich producers of oil and gas under control. Yes that’s the biggy. It must take really greedy or stupid people not to see the danger we are all in, including them.

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(C) Peter Scott 2024

Last edit 25 February 2025