Plastic, plastic everywhere, with no thought to spare
It is the weekend. I order a pizza from a well-known food company. The pizza arrives in a box that is inside a plastic bag. It contains more plastic articles: gloves, forks and knives.
It is a weekday. I visit a well-known bakery and pick what I like and head to the cash counter. The staff member there places each food item, however small, in a separate plastic bag.
I am online. I buy things on a well-known e-commerce site. The objects are quickly delivered to my doorstep, each wrapped in plastic or a similar material.
This is Beijing — and there is a lot of plastic in my life.
I should tell the pizza chain to send me just the box. I should shop at the bakery with a multiuse bag, always. I should do more to cut down on plastic consumption.
Being aware of plastic pollution isn’t enough. We need to act.
Students in many schools around the world are learning about the importance of sustainable development from early childhood these days. They are being told to “reduce, reuse and recycle” plastic, for instance. The children know, as we did before them, that water and paper should be used wisely because we need more rivers and trees, not less.
But the younger inheritors of the Earth are going beyond basics. Some have even emerged as community leaders in the climate campaign.
Adults, who have yet to wake up to the ecological realities of our time, need to pay attention to such efforts.
A dead whale recently washed up on a shore in the Philippines. Its stomach was stuffed with 40 kilograms of plastic. Experts told media the young beaked male whale had died due to starvation and dehydration. Ingested plastic blocks food from traveling to the intestine from the stomach in marine creatures. They are also unable to absorb water from food in the seas.
This pollution crisis is deepening globally, and dolphins, whales, birds and fish are increasingly found dead with plastic in their stomachs.
Plastic is a synthetic or semi-synthetic material that can change form without largely breaking. The first fully synthetic plastic was invented in the United States in 1907. The biggest environmental concern with plastic is its slow decomposition rate (could take thousands of years) and in most cases it is not biodegradable. Let’s say, some plastics never die. But the material is cheap, relatively easy to manufacture and lightweight, which is why plastic production has boomed over the past century. A UN agency in its “state of plastics” report in 2018 estimated the trend will continue as global production skyrockets in the next 10 to 15 years.
“About 13 million metric tons of plastics leak into our oceans every year, harming biodiversity, economies and, potentially, our own health,” the report warned.
It urged governments to regulate and businesses to innovate (such as find alternative materials) in order to fight plastic pollution. The total economic damage to the world’s marine ecosystem caused by plastic amounts to at least $13 billion a year, the report added.
In consumer-driven societies, the worst bane in this context is singleuse plastic, with most common forms being cigarette butts, beverage bottles, bottle caps, food wrappers, grocery bags, lids, straws and stirrers, takeout containers and so on.
The worldwide production of plastic was at least 322 million metric tons in 2015. The bulk of synthetic fibers is manufactured in Asia, according to the World Economic Forum.
China, some other developing countries and the US are among those that need better management of plastic waste. A lot is ending up in the waters.
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