Plastic wastes cause environmental pollution. — The United News of Bangladesh
MUCH like King Midas, humanity’s desire came true when we figured out how to transform ordinary brown slime into a magical substance called plastic almost a century ago. We have been swimming in a world of plastic since the first synthetic polymers were produced in 1907. Today, almost everything is partly made out of plastic. But plastic has long ceased to be a game-changing material. It has become trash. Many things that were not plastic before are now plastic. It has invaded animals and now finds its way to human bodies. We are, unfortunately, wrecking nature at an astounding speed and the impact of the growing population and consumption now directly threatens the existence.
Before the 1950s, worldwide plastic manufacturing growth was slow. But after World War II, 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic were produced globally in 1950 and 2018, of which 9 per cent was recycled, 12 per cent incinerated and the remaining 79 per cent, or 6.3 billion tonnes of waste, was still stuck around. Assuming 1.4 per cent of the world’s plastics, which translates to about 8 million tonnes annually, have accumulated in the oceans since 2004.
Under a business-as-usual scenario and without necessary intervention, the plastic wastes that enter marine environments might rise from 9–14 million tonnes in 2016 to 155–265 million tonnes by 2060 annually. An estimated 513 million tonnes of plastic waste were dumped into the ocean in 2018. According to a 2015 study by Science, only 20 countries account for 83.1 per cent of all plastic wastes and the rest of the world accounts for 16.9 per cent of all ocean plastic. Plastic pollution represents a severe global environmental issue that negatively impacts sustainable development’s environmental, social, economic and health dimensions.
Many people do not realise that 98 per cent of plastic inputs are fossil fuels. New synthetic plastics can be formed by breaking down crude oil components and rearranging them. The resource-intensive and toxic processes of fossil fuel extraction have boomed because of a rising energy demand. We do not know that more than two-thirds of the apparel is based on fossil fuel. Polyester, also known as PET, is the most affordable and widely used synthetic fibre. Polyester fibre requires about 70 million barrels of oil annually. But the problem is that PET contains harmful antimony. Antimony is not treated or captured in the textile industry’s wastewater treatment in numerous countries where it has been made.
Another interesting unknown fact about the plastics industry is that it also invented ‘recycling.’ In the early 1970s, petrochemical leaders realised that most plastic would never be recycled. In April 1973, industry scientists warned CEOs that sorting hundreds of plastic varieties would be ‘infeasible’ and expensive. Plastics cannot be recycled entirely because all the waste is dumped elsewhere. This study prompted a strategy in which industry leaders understood in the late 1980s that promoting plastic recycling would increase its use. So, they launched a $50 million/year corporate marketing effort to persuade consumers that plastic can be recycled.
They knew their recycling efforts would fail. Hence, the industry persuaded municipalities to develop expensive plastic waste collection facilities and enforce recycling triangle emblems with a number in the centre and letters below printed on practically every piece of plastic. Although process one is the easiest, processes six and seven are tricky when working with plastic. Only items with a number one or two on them may be recycled. As a consequence, today, many recycling operations are flooded with non-recyclable plastics.
The plastics industry carefully invests in resources to counteract its hazardous effects. The Consortium to Eliminate Plastic Waste was founded in 2019 by 28 major oil, chemical, and plastic giants. To prioritise recycling, they committed $1.5 billion to waste management programmes. The number is minuscule compared with the hundreds of billions of dollars the oil, gas and chemical sectors have set aside for growing plastic production capacity in future, but little effort is made to limit plastic manufacture or develop alternative materials. People think recycling is good; it is green. But we are overloading the environment to give fossil fuel businesses a lifeline.
In 2019, Break Free from Plastic brought together over 70,000 volunteers in 51 countries to collect and identify plastic waste. A Guardian report said these volunteers collected around 59,000 bags, 53,000 sachets, and 29,000 plastic bottles, of which almost half were consumer brands. These companies voluntarily committed to using virgin and recycled material in their packaging, even though some were more ambitious than others. Unfortunately, when businesses do not meet their goals, they tend to make false promises, change their goals, or give up on the commitment altogether. For example, most of the more than 100 pledges to reduce plastic in packaging were made in the past few years and most were aimed at 2025 or 2030.
Regrettably, around two-thirds of them were either never delivered or heard of again. Although, the French food conglomerate Danone pledged to use 20–30 per cent recycled PET plastic in water bottles by 2011, the company delayed its promise by nearly a decade and used only 19.8 per cent recycled PET in 2020. Its new target is to use 100 per cent recycled PET for all their European brands and 50 per cent worldwide by 2025. Likewise, Unilever intends to use 50 per cent less new plastics by 2025. However, other companies are even further away from achieving their commitments.
Most pledges also focus on PET, the most accessible material to recycle, instead of the enormous amounts of trash that cannot be recycled. However, only 17 per cent of all plastic packaging is PET polypropylene and the remaining 83 per cent is made of hard-to-recycle plastics, such as LDPE or HDPE. Three of the top 10 plastic producers, the Coca-Cola company, Nestlé SA and PepsiCo have not met their minimum virgin plastic consumption goals. Instead, it seems businesses are using voluntary promises to avoid necessary reforms. But the industry has done a terrific job convincing the public that plastic is a waste issue. One objective was to divert attention from regulation; the second was to make ordinary people feel responsible and encourage them to better dispose of their plastic waste. Regrettably, a Changing Markets Foundation report says, this consortium formed a well-financed network that has sabotaged government and community efforts for decades to address the plastic pollution crisis.
The effects of plastic pollution on land, rivers, oceans and human beings are enormous because it is everywhere. Plastics are used and thrown away carelessly and there are not enough systems and policies to deal with waste. By 2015, 90 per cent of seabirds had ingested plastic. Many marine animals end up starving to death because their intestines are full of garbage that they cannot digest. By 2050, the quantity of plastic produced worldwide will be greater than the total biomass of all aquatic and terrestrial creatures. The Ocean Cleanup estimated in 2021 that rivers carry 0.8–2.7 million tonnes of plastic into the ocean. Ten African and eight Asian rivers carry 88–95 per cent of global plastics into the ocean.
A type of plastic called ‘microplastics’ is an even more common and scary problem. Microplastics are pieces smaller than five millimetres. Most results from floating waste constantly exposed to UV radiation and crumbling into smaller and smaller pieces. According to an estimation, 51 trillion such particles float in the ocean, where all kinds of marine life even more easily swallow them. This has raised concerns among scientists, especially about the health risks from the chemicals added to plastic. Microplastics have been found in honey, sea salt, beer, tap water, and household dust around us. Clothing made out of plastic sheds almost invisible microplastics. Scientists identified millions of plastic nanoparticles in washing machine waste water and detected them in Arctic ice. The increasing human absorption of microplastics impairs male reproductive function. Chemicals that disrupt hormone balance disproportionately negatively impact immunity and reproductive systems of adolescents and women of childbearing age. Microplastics were identified in the blood of 80 per cent of study participants, according to research published in Environment International in 2022.
Due to chemicals added during plastics manufacturing, everyday plastic items, such as food packaging, medical equipment, flooring materials, bottles, perfumes and cosmetics, contain more than 10,000 hazardous additives, softeners, phthalates, chemicals, and metals, creating enormous problems for human health and existence. For instance, eight out of 10 babies and nearly all adults have measurable amounts of phthalates, a common plastic additive, in their bodies.
In addition, bisphenol A makes plastic bottles transparent, but there is also evidence that it interferes with our hormonal system. Bisphenol A is a compound typically associated with plastics and linked to several adverse health consequences, including fertility, reproduction and sexual development; 93 per cent of people have bisphenol A in their urine. PBDEs can make plastic products challenging to burn and reduce the fire risk, but they may alter neuro-development, cause thyroid disruption, and cause reproductive impairment. DEHP makes plastics more flexible, but it may cause cancer. Chlorinated plastic can also discharge harmful chemicals into the earth, eventually reaching water supplies like groundwater and impacting the ecosystem globally.
There is another, more insidious problem with plastic: waste incineration. Waste incineration, mainly when producing energy, is often considered an innovative solution to the trash problem. But when plastics, paper and other materials are used as fuel in waste-to-energy plants, it raises the cancer risk for communities nearby or even by 20 to 40 kilometres. In addition, 60 per cent of discarded plastic medical equipment is burnt to prevent disease transmission, which might decrease the medical plastic waste significantly but create another severe one. Incinerators do not eliminate waste. It goes up the smokestack and falls on farms, fields, playgrounds, schools, and backyards. However, so many harmful substances make pinpointing one exposure to one particular health effect hard.
It is not simple to keep track where all plastic waste goes. It might be sent to an existing recycling facility or a landfill, and sometimes the landfills are not even in the same country as the person who generated the waste. In addition, the international waste trade is difficult to monitor in detail. Because of that, the global north governments and their corporations are eager to pay to get rid of their waste while businesses in developing countries, where there is no laboratory, no enforcement, and lack of rigorous labour and environmental standards, are happy to barter for the waste. Following the patterns of waste transportation worldwide, hazardous wastes follow the path of least resistance, seeking out communities lacking the educational or financial resources to fight this.
In many cases, adequate waste disposal facilities may not be used after the waste has been brought in. Instead of being recycled cleanly, plastic is reprocessed in disgusting ways that put workers’ health at risk. Plastic is either burned in massive fires or sold by truckload to rural populations in developing countries. The last resort for plastic is in the landfill, which will produce the most potent gas, methane. The finest pieces were cherry-picked by people and sold to nearby plastics companies while the remainder was piled up and used as a cheap, abundant and unfortunately exceedingly poisonous fuel source.
China has long been the world’s primary plastics dumping site. The monthly influx of imported plastic debris peaked in 2016, reaching about 600,000 tonnes. However, after it had been discovered that the vast majority of waste materials imported to China were instead burnt or buried, the country enforced a prohibition on importing many of these commodities in 2018. Southeast Asian countries followed China’s lead and banned foreign plastic waste, which did not completely stop the waste flowing into their borders. Interestingly, several nations outside China ended up receiving the trash that was initially intended for China. Moreover, violations of the Basel Convention have been rampant during 2021, with the United States, Canada and the European Union sending millions of tonnes of plastic to countries with insufficient waste management infrastructure. Research in 2019 discovered that just 12 or 58 containers returned to the United States while 38 arrived in India and the remaining containers were tracked to South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Mexico, the Netherlands and Canada.
Over the past decade, single-use plastics like bags and styrofoam have proliferated. Countries, including Canada, the United States and those in the European Union, have prohibited bisphenol A in baby bottles and children’s cups because of health concerns and younger children’s greater vulnerability to effects of bisphenol A. Many other countries have followed suit, but with varying degrees of success. The European Union has recently followed suit and passed some ambitious plastics legislation. The EU just passed an ambitious single-use plastic regulation that bans plastic bags, cutlery and straws. Moreover, charges have been implemented to discourage some plastic waste management practices and encourage the uniform use of biodegradable plastic.
The most encouraging event happened on March 20, 2022, in Nairobi, Kenya. Resolution 5/14, passed by the United Nations Environment Assembly at its fifth session, is widely regarded as a landmark effort to safeguard the planet’s natural resources. By 2024, 175 countries have agreed to develop an international instrument that will be legally binding in their fight against plastic pollution, especially in the ocean. From product design to environmentally responsible waste management, the instrument examines how to promote the sustainable manufacture and consumption of plastics globally. The agreement attempts to facilitate a shift towards a more circular economic paradigm while simultaneously reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 25 per cent.
We need a holistic approach that deals with environmental and climate implications of plastic to solve plastic and climate issues in Bangladesh. Such regulations, guidelines, and strategies could be (1) a ban on single-use plastic as a critical first step towards tackling the plastic crisis. Comprehensive national policy and governance frameworks, laws and strategies for a transparent and effective waste management system are required to tackle the plastic pollution disaster. The measures include decreasing the amount of plastic trash sent to landfills, launching environmental certification programmes, phasing out certain plastics, increasing access to acceptable replacements and putting an end to open incineration.
Long-term harmonisation of environmental monitoring, assessment methods and institutional capacity could improve coastal management, and developing an interactive map of plastic trash can help find the people who are responsible. Investing in more sustainable low-carbon and low-chemical production processes can reduce the carbon and chemical footprint of plastic and help to mitigate climate change effects.
Governments need to make rules that hold companies more accountable for designing, recovering, recycling and getting rid of their products in a sustainable way.
It is estimated that by 2030, annual emissions from plastics will rise to 1.34 billion tonnes; by 2050, plastic may be responsible for the emission of greenhouse gases equivalent to 14 per cent of the world’s remaining carbon budget. By 2100, when global emissions are expected to reach 260 billion tonnes, more than a half of the world’s total carbon budget will have been discharged. We will not be able to stop plastic pollution until we start thinking about it on a global scale. Everything we do daily still matters and has a significant effect. A pollution-free planet requires consumer paradigm adjustments.
Md Zahurul Al Mamun is an independent climate researcher.
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