Author Atwood: Stop worshipping plastic

MARGARET Atwood says the worship of plastic has become a ‘religion’ that is poisoning the planet.

The Handmaid’s Tale author said if she could reform one institution, it would be the plastics industry.

Miss Atwood added: ‘Are plastics an institution? Not in the sense of having a Pope, or even a small cabal of leaders. But they are surely the modern equivalent of a universal religion.

‘We worship them, whether we admit it or not. Their centre is whatever you happen to be doing, their circumference is everywhere; they’re as essential to our modern lives as the air we breathe, and they’re killing us. They must be stopped.’ The 78-year-old author told the Guardian: ‘Once upon a time, not so long ago – within my own lifetime, or just before its inception – there was hardly any plastic.

‘There was only Bakelite, used to make decorative dessert-fork handles and chunky art deco jewellery.

‘Cheap toys were made of tin. Garbage was rolled up in newspaper and tied with string, because there were no plastic binbags. There were no exercise balls. Rubber gloves were made of rubber. But then came the marvellous multi-plastic world of the 1950s that has been with us ever since. Look around your life: your trash-disposal stratagems, your bottled water containers, your hummus tubs and snaptop salad boxes, your computer keyboard keys, your grocery bags, just for a few obvious examples.

‘Where would you be without plastic? What could take its place?’

Miss Atwood added: ‘But all this plastic – or most of it – eventually ends up in the water supply, including the drinking water and the oceans.

‘Eight million tonnes of plastic waste is added to the oceans every year. Because of oestrogen-imitating chemicals leaching from discarded plastics, the fertility of male sperm is plunging, and frogs are developing intersex traits.

‘Worse, microplastic particles are seriously affecting fish fry and phytoplankton. That’s bad news for us, because phytoplankton are the basic building block of oceanic life.’

Miss Atwood said ‘dead oceans mean dead people’ because humans relied on healthy oceans for food and to replenish the oxygen we breathed. She called for organic and biodegradable substitutes to be used instead of plastic, and for microplastics to be filtered from seawater.