Look around you, and what do you see? If you are in or around a modern building, vehicle or other man-made structure then the chances are that you will be able to see some plastic. I can see a printer, a scanner, some speakers, a desk tidy, CD cases, a clothes airer, some video cases, a moulded plug, a keyboard, mouse and monitor case. Can you imagine these things without plastic existing?

If we were to remove plastic from our world then modern society would, literally, fall apart. The use of oil, synthetic chemicals, plastics and high technology form a cluster of things around which we have built modern society, and which most of us could probably not imagine living without.

So what is 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 it 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.

A Barbie Doll is made from plastic and around 100 million are sold each year. Compared to a wooden doll it is far more flexible and far cheaper to make, as is all the packaging that surrounds that doll when you buy it.

During the last football World Cup, in England alone the aforementioned Sainsburys were expecting to sell 750,000 plastic flags out of a probable 30-40 million overall.

The thing that strikes you when you read the figures is not so much that plastic is heavily used in these 3 items, but the sheer numbers. 100 million Barbie dolls a year!

When you compare the ease of making something from plastic, compared to making the same thing from an alternate material then two striking things come to light.

Firstly, some things that we take for granted are relatively difficult or expensive to make from materials other than plastic. These are often things that many of us would not even care to have, let alone use in any great quantity if western commercial enterprise hadn’t convinced us that they are good things to have; such as plastic flags, plastic kettles, plastic bottles of Coca Cola and daily bio-drinks, plastic bags, plastic children's cars…it really is a list that is getting longer as I type these words.

To take just three common items; most clothing sold in the world now has an element of plastic – nylon, polyester, acrylic – to make it easier to wash, iron and produce in a highly mechanised manner; 35% of the plastic used in the UK is in packaging, because it is cheap, easily shaped, light and transparent when required; finally, children's toys can be produced in quite astonishing numbers – McDonalds alone give away around 1.5 billion toys every year. Switching to alternative materials such as metal, wood and natural fabrics to provide both the qualities and the quantities of these goods would be immensely difficult. Switching to alternative materials at the same cost would be impossible.
 
Secondly, even if it were possible to produce the same quantity of goods, how would it be possible to maintain this level of production sustainably? If 1.5 billion small toys per year were produced from wood, added to the enormous amount of additional card required for packaging the world’s consumer goods, the already scarce ancient forests of the world would be decimated. The millions of tonnes of wool, hemp, jute, cotton and other natural materials required to replace synthetic materials would require immense amounts of land, fertiliser, pesticides (the world is not about to go organic overnight) and animal feed would severely cut into our food supplies and, ironically, future supplies of “bio fuels”. If all consumer items were made from metals, glass and natural substances, such as vulcanised rubber, not only would they be heavier to transport and more expensive to produce, the metals mined would require a huge acceleration in damaging hard rock mining, and in some cases the products would not be safe enough to sell to the public. Sometimes plastic is the only answer.

But if plastic is the only answer to our current appetite, what happens as oil starts to run out and the cost of plastic rises? Are we prepared to curb our consumer appetite for cheap, plentiful goods, or will we defend to the hilt our “rights” as consumers to have whatever we want, whatever the consequences?

In the end it may be our greed for the symbols of the consumer society that sign the death knell for both plastic, and the lives we have become so used to.

 

The Earth Blog’s “The Problem With…” articles are short opinion pieces that take an uncompromising look at key things that affect the global environment.

Here in the USA, two plastic trends in the wrong direction: hand and bath soap in plastic bottles instead of bars, and single serving water bottles. I never thought people would pay for bottled water as an everyday thing, but they do. I admit to having some for excursions, but I refill them from the tap many times. As for the soap, I've been lured astray by the dozens of different fragrances of bottled shower gel. Well, back to bar soap and its minimal packaging. Giving up hand soap pump bottles is much more difficult. Even if you refill them, the refill liquid still comes in a plastic bottle. If only stores would sell THAT on tap...

Thanks Joyce. Spot on with those two items - I drink tap water, and buy bar soap all the time - but bottles are becoming ubiquitous. Let's bring back the bar!

there was a mess we cleaned up or still cleaning up, It is the oil field's of kuwait all that oil burning into the air and polluting the world and warming it up it probably pushing the warming a few hundred thousand year's into the melt down so I think the blame should be put on the husane's action in Kuwait don't blame the car's the power plant's and who ever els the oil field's of kuwait is the blame :(

But who wanted the oil in the first place James? We're all to blame, and Saddam Hussein was just another in a long line of people corrupted by power.

Hello, Clicked over from the sietch site. You rock, Keith! A good friend of mine from Germany and I had a very similar discussion last year comparing the US and Germany in respects to use of plastics versus glass drink containers. It is definitely hard to say no to behaviors that we have learned from our parents or friends i.e. buying food to go. We can only hope to slowly change to a more sustainable and less plastic bag lined world of the future.

Thanks Dew, not many people say I rock, so that's nice! My parents hardly had any packaging, it's my generation (in the UK anyway) that have learnt the bad behaviour and passed it on to their children. Slow change might not be an option, and in lots of cases it's very easy to change back now. But like smoking, some people can't, or won't kick the habit. Keith.

Hi,

Plastic is a big problem, in Sydney, Australia we're slowly phasing out disposable plastic shopping bags. By 2008 they should be totally eradicated from supermarket checkouts! It's a good start to solving a huge problem. More details on the phase-out here.

Vincenze.

Hi Vincenze, nice Blog. Plastic bags are a very public way of getting the debate going, but at about 5 microns thick it's more about litter than energy or oil saving. We need to cut deeply into the supermarket and manufacturers' overuse of packaging to make a real difference - but Australia is very politically conservative, so if a plastic bag phase out is so objectionable, imagine what an outcry a packaging phase out would cause :(

I agree Keith, especially with packaging. treehugger.com run a waste of packaging contest to raise awareness, it's a hoot!

And it still bugs me when I get offered a bag for 1 or two items, habit is so powerful.

Keith, I think you're right to try to get beyond the emotional aspect of this to figure out what -- if anything -- is really environmentally bad about plastic. In a lot of ways it's a wonderful material -- light, moldable, cheap and long-lasting.

It's that combo: cheap and long-lasting. That seems to be the curse... it's a permanent material people use in a throwaway mode. Therefor it contributes to litter, animal fouling, etc.

But let's face it there is something much more going on here. Environmentalists don't like plastic because it feels 'fake' and 'modern'. It's an issue of taste. Glass seems much more organic, but serious analysis suggests that its total environmental impact is often greater than plastic's, because glass items are so much heavier in practice (and therefore require much more energy to move around). See http://www.ilea.org/lcas/Tellus.html .

Environmentalists are typically obsessed with recycling, because it's a way of atoning for their heavy consumption. But that report I quoted concludes with a very sensible suggestion: recycling doesn't help nearly as much as not consuming at all. Here's a quote:
--
First considering that the environmental cost of production contributes 99% of the environmental harm, reducing disposal isn't going to help as much as cutting production. The problem of packaging facing the environment is not a problem related to disposal. It is a problem of production, which directly relates to consumption. The solution according to the Tellus scale isn't a matter of improving recycling or disposal rates, but consuming less.
--

Cheers!

http://bottleworld.net

Thanks Bottleman. Good link, I will read it. I'm glad we agree.

Keith

I have just discovered the earth blog - what a great find! I was specially pleased to see plastics being discussed but was surprised that people seem to think that the waste element of plastic is the only concern. I've long been concerned about the health impact of food which has been packaged - and sometimes even cooked! - in plastic. I've this week been reading the WWF report which says that - 'hazardous chemicals are found in the tissue of nearly every person on Earth and exposure to these toxics have been linked to a higher incidence in several cancers, reproductive problems and birth defects.' Plastics are guilty of spreading 'questionable' chemicals throughout the food chain. It is suggested that far from being 'inert' plastic gives off emmissions which can seriously damage health. If you want to know more just look on the WWF website. The lack of legislation governing what chemicals can be used in everyday products and the difficulty the EU is facing in getting any legislation in place makes pretty troubling reading.

Hi Eileen, and good to hear from you (via Green Seniors?). Glad you like The Earth Blog, it's a labour of love, and not an easy ride.

Toxins and other sources of environmental damage, especially those that cause global warming, seem to have a complex relationship. Some devices that save energy, for instance (e.g. CFLs, solar panels, superconductors), have materials that we would rather do without - but on balance may have to be tolerated. On the other hand, and in most cases, I feel, toxins, waste and gobal warming go hand in hand - the flooding of the natural environment with vast amounts of seemingly inert (in tiny amounts) materials is enescapable, yet the means for nature to deal with them is disappearing along with that same natural environment.

Keith

Great discussion here... I was wondering if this blog is still active. I am noodling on how to bring awareness to mainstream America through IdealBite.com 500K subscribers and wanted to ask your opinions. Thanks! Jen

[Hi Jen, very much active - but as you will see from my recent posts, I don't do light green. There is plenty of awareness in the USA, but hardly any *acceptance* of our perilous situation. Once people accept the situation then strange and wonderful things happen - that has to be the aim.

Please read A Matter Of Scale - I think you will enjoy it.

Keith]