A Nasty Package

Over the past few years it has been growing on me, an ever increasing hatred of plastic. This may seem an unreasonable reaction to a product that is strong, lightweight and waterproof all at once, that houses my computer and stops the electricity from running out of my plugs. Ok I don’t hate all plastic what I actually hate is the abuse of plastic. I hate the way this incredibly versatile product is used to make stupid trashy items and the way it is manufactured into bags and bottles and wrappings for just about every product on the market.
Our society seems to have developed an insatiable desire to wrap everything in plastic. Just look at how much plastic we “use” in a day. Breakfast and bread, yogurt and milk are wrapped in plastic, midmorning snack comes in its plastic sheath, dinner time and it’s a sandwich in a plastic box and a drink in a plastic bottle all popped into a plastic bag on purchase, afternoon coffee from the vending machine comes in a plastic cup and then its onto to the supermarket for the weekly shop. Back home with bulging plastic bags and its not even teatime.
Already we have created a mountain of one-use disposable plastic products. But here is the rub - plastic of course isn’t really very disposable. This is non biodegradable rubbish. We are making throwaway items from a product that takes centuries possibly millennia to degrade. So collected from our stuffed bins it may be out of sight but it hasn’t gone away. As it doesn’t biodegrade it just sits there filling up the land fill sites. If we burn it, it adds to the greenhouse effect and releases poisons into the air. Recycling is not always cost effective and for many items impracticable.
Then there is the plastic that isn’t out of sight. What with deliberate littering, accidental droppage and the wind, the accumulation of plastic litter is visibly on the increase. It is increasing because it is accumulating. Whereas a paper bag has rotted away in 6 months the plastic bag is still going strong in 6 years. While some litter might eventually get picked up - (yet another cost), there is the stuff out of reach - up in branches, floating down the rivers, washing up on beaches and hanging in the dirty grey tattered shreds on barbed wire. There is a plastic rubbish island in the centre of the Pacific created by a vortex in the tides that is solid enough to walk on.
And it doesn’t just look ugly - it’s a real killer. Plastic waste kills thousands of animals a year.
Not clean not even cheap. Not only is there the collecting and disposing of the filthy stuff, all this one-use rubbish hanging around our streets and filling our dumps is made from oil - that’s right - black gold. Waste online estimate “ that 4% of the world's annual oil production is used as a feedstock for plastics production and an additional 3-4% during manufacture.” That’s a lot of non renewable, essential resource being used to triple wrap a vegetable.
Yes we are using chemically modified petrol to wrap our food. Not surprisingly there have been concerns that this might not be safe. Some of the chemicals used to make plastic have not actually been passed as fit for human consumption. More worrying still they appear to be mobile. In 1998, Dr. Patricia Hunt of Case Western University in Ohio discovered that damaged or worn or warm plastics made from polycarbonate resin can leach biphenyl. As I am sure you know - biphenyl is a chemical suspected of causing damage to the reproductive organs. Biphenyl is also the stuff they use in bottles containing drinks. In 2003 the University of Missouri raised the worry ante by finding detectable levels of Biphenyl had leached into liquids kept in undamaged bottles at room temperature. Yum.
Finally, if the leaching doesn’t shrivel your goolies there’s a good chance the pork chops will. When it finally does finally break down plastic doesn’t actually biodegrade it photo degrades. It falls apart in to smaller and smaller toxic particles. These are then absorbed into the surrounding environment entering the water and earth and so the food chain and so into us.
In short plastic is a dirty, expensive, possibly carcinogenic, profligate use of the worlds resources resulting in an overwhelming tide of permanent, non biodegradable debris for what - so we don’t have to carry our own bags to the supermarket?
Well I’m sorry but that’s a nasty package