World is staring at an enormous plastic crisis

Unless we take immediate steps to reduce its consumption, we may literally drown under its deluge

The price of living a lifestyle under the tyranny of the indestructible, ubiquitous, indispensable thing called plastic is now beginning to pinch as the planet slowly suffocates in its choke hold. Across the world, from mountain tops to lakes, rivers and oceans to streets and roads, and even into the belly of gigantic urban landfills packed with it, the volume of plastic garbage smothering the environment is a roll call of staggering statistics. For example, the world has produced nine billion tonnes of plastic from the 1950s upto 2017, with 91 per cent of it not recycled. Every minute across the world, a million bottles of plastic are used. So where does this leave us and the planet?

In a precipitous moment of reckoning.

Unless every one of us takes immediate steps to reduce plastic consumption, we may quite literally drown under its deluge. Take marine environment. Researchers have found that plastic pollution levels have been growing exponentially since measurements began in the 1970s. It is estimated that there is a 1:2 ratio of plastic to plankton in the world’s oceans and left unchecked, plastic will outweigh fish by 2050. The picture on the ground fares no better. In the UAE alone, 450 plastic bottles are used by each person in a year. One million tonnes of plastic waste was generated in Dubai in 2017. But it’s not yet a lost war.

Every plastic item not bought, every plastic item bought and sent for recycling at the end of its term, every single attempt at not littering the planet with plastic debris, these simple steps have a powerful pay-off.

The truth is, there was life before plastic and if we do not acknowledge this and reduce our dependence on it, there may not be much of a life to look forward to.