Are We Going to Ever Overcome Plastic Pollution?

10 days ago

Recycling is one word you hear a lot with plastics, one sign you see on every plastic yet, plastic has become a pain in our lives. First it is damaging the planet, poisoning our bodies, killing sea lives and birds alike, and it looks like we aren't going to stop using it any time soon.

Plastic wasn't created to be a problem, it was actually created as a solution to problems that were available at the time, and it was created to be environmentally friendly. In case you did not know, most of the things we make with plastic today were made from animals in the past, which meant that these animals had to be killed for those things to be made. For instance, the Ballonets or Airsacks , of the British R101 airship was made from the Caecum of Ox and to create such magnificent airsack, it took 50 thousand OX caecum which meant that about 50 thousand Oxen had to die to create one ship. Another was using Elephant trunks to create Piano keyboards, and other artifacts or furniture that needed to be white and this led to ivory trade that almost put elephants to extinction.

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Talking about Elephant trunks and Ivory, people in the 1860s loved to play pools and it was so popular but you know what, the billiard balls used were made from elephant trunks which meant that more elephants had to die for people to play pool and the more popular it was the more the animals died. The popularity of pools led to the shortage of ivory and this led to the increase in the price of the trunks. In 1869, Micheal Phelan who owned a billiard company where they produced pool boards as well as billiard balls decided to look for an alternative for elephant trunks in the creation of billiard balls.

He didn't do this because he loved Elephants or wanted to stop the killing of them, he did it because the ivory market was making his business unprofitable. So chemists and physicist came together to get an alternative and while you would expect that people would create different things but they didn't meet up with the trunk characteristics of strength and weight, not until John Wesley Hyatt created a billiard board from what he referred to as Celluloid which was a combination of Cellulose and Nitrate (Nitric acid + Sulfuric acid + Cellulose). He got his idea from the work of Alexander Parkes. He was able to turn plant material into a billiard ball but there was a setback, which was its ability to explode or catch fire but then Phelan used it like that since it was a better alternative.

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In 1907 bakelite was invented by a chemist named Leo Baekeland, and this was a progress for plastic. Bakelite was a completely synthetic material and was used to make radios, cabinets, and auto parts. In 1932, another great progress was made with plastic as Imperial Chemical industries made the first Petroleum based plastic known as Perspex (acrylic glass).

In the 1930s Nylon, Kevlar, Freon, Lucite, and Teflon became a thing, thanks to US chemical giant DuPont and soon plastic became a thing. This was the innovation of the future to people at the time and it took people by surprise and plastic manufacturer enjoyed the war as they were making incredible profits from the war as plastic were used for a lot of things including parachutes but then the war ended and business needed to continue and as you would expect, they began to produce household products including clothing.

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In the 1970s we began to realize that plastics were doing more harm than good with with a paper published in 1972 in the journal of Science by Edward J Carpenter and Smith, K.L. talking about the effect of plastics in Oceans causing pollution as well as the presence of microplastics. The paper looked at recycling plastics because it would not degrade like paper and wood after a few years.

We know that plastics do not breakdown easily and can take up to 500 years to do so which led the environmental community to begin the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle Campaign but you see, a lot of these plastics aren't going through the recycle process. Also, if we are going to follow words from the Vinyl Institute which says that

"Recycling cannot be considered a permanent solid waste solution, as it is merely prolonging the time until an item is disposed of.."

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Then we can say that recycling isn't a permanent solution moreover plastics companies are making money by producing more plastics but then if we are going to recycle, how do we do it? When you see the recycle logo, it comes with the number 1 to 7 but then I should state that as a consumer our concerns are with 1 and 2 because they are the easily recyclable ones with 1 being PET (Polyethylene Terephthalate) and 2 being HDPE (High Density Polyethylene). Others are difficult to recycle or logistically hard to recycle and they include 3 which is PVC (Polyvinyl Chloride), 4 which is LDPE (Low-Density Polyethylene) and is collected for recycling in specialized places, 5 being PP (Polypropylene) which can also be recycled, 6 which is PS (Polystyrene) which is difficult to recycle, and 7 for Others. But as at today, only about 9% of plastics are recycled, so what happens to the rest? they are thrown into landfills, or are incinerated.

So are we going to end plastic pollution in the end, will more plastics be recycled over the years or do we have to hope that there will be another innovation that will displace plastic before we can have a non-plastic polluted planet? This questions are worrisome, and even in 2024, I do not know if we have answers to them.

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2 comments

@ahmedhayat 66

10 days ago

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@stemsocial 64

9 days ago

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