Throwaway Living
Plastic got a boost after the end of World War II when Life magazine came out with a cover story titled ‘Throwaway Living’ in its August 1, 1955 issue. This article first used the term "throw-away society", in which housewives are liberated from the drudgery of daily chores as they would no longer have to wash and clean utensils. Disposable plastic utensils and other objects were in vogue now. With this began a plastic revolution that quickly took hold, infiltrating every part of our day-to-day lives.
If you look around, plastic is everywhere and in everything, even the seemingly natural cotton t-shirt you’re wearing is held together with stronger, cheaper polyester threads. The huge problem with plastics is that they take up a lot of space and are non-biodegradable. They are also hard to recycle. They cannot be purified by re-melting process like glass and metal.
Plastics may have many benefits and a multitude of amazing applications but the fact remains; we have become the first and only species on the planet to produce mountains, quite literally, of non-biodegradable waste.
In the broad expanse of the northern Pacific Ocean, there exists the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a slowly moving, clockwise spiral of currents created by a high-pressure system of air currents which besides planktons contains trash, millions of pounds of it, most of which is plastic. It's the largest landfill in the world, except that it floats in the middle of the ocean. It is also better known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or the Trash Vortex.
This toxic soup of debris estimated to be at least twice the size of Texas and mostly contains tiny pea sized particles of plastic, almost impossible to clean-up. This debris is responsible for the death of an estimated 100,000 marine mammals a year. And these deaths are not limited to the North Pacific.
Environmentalists examined stomachs of juvenile turtles found off the coast of Argentina. The bellyful of debris that they found is symptomatic of the increasing threat to the sea turtles from this human addiction to plastic. Yes. Humans, and humans alone are responsible for this.
Sea turtles often mistake plastic items for jellyfish or other food. Ingesting non-biodegradable ocean pollution causes a digestive blockage and internal wounds. The result is serious loss of energy, followed by death.
Millions of albatross inhabiting Kure and Midway atolls in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands National Monument search for food here and scavenge whatever they can to feed their chicks. A four-month old Laysan Albatross chick died with plastic in its stomach. A large number of the goose-sized chicks are dying with stomachs full of bottle caps and other rubbish, like cigarette lighters. Sadly, their parents mistake bottle caps for food tossing about in the ocean surface.
Every one of us has an obligation to think about what we throw away. There are many potential solutions that realise the creative potential in waste but making them viable and available takes time, commitment and collaboration.
Humans currently produce 260 million tons of plastic a year. When those products are pulled into the sea's currents, the plastics do not biodegrade but are broken into smaller pieces which are consumed by marine life at the bottom of the food chain.
The biggest misunderstanding people have on this issue is that they think the ocean is like a lake and we can go out with nets and just clean it up. People find it difficult to grasp the true size of the oceans and the fact that most of this plastic is in tiny pieces and it's everywhere.
Straining the ocean for plastic would be beyond the budget of any country and it might kill incalculable amounts of sea life in the process. The solution is to stop the plastic at its source: stop it on land before it falls in the ocean. And in a plastic-wrapped and packaged world, one doesn't hold out much hope for that, either.
In general terms, it is clear what we need to do about plastic. Since it is made from oil, which will run out in our lifetimes and get more expensive as it does, we have to start re-using plastic and designing it for re-use. At present only a few of our many hundred plastics can simply be melted down and moulded into something else; the rest are cross-contaminated with other chemicals and types of plastic. But the billion- dollar plastic industry is tooled for virgin plastic and resistant to change.
For consumers, the easiest way to make a difference is to give up plastic shopping bags and plastic water bottles, which contribute more to plastic pollution than any other products. Then comes plastic packaging, which is a little more complicated. It is easy to point out examples of excessive packaging, but plastic does have the virtue of being lighter than paper, cardboard and glass, which gives it a smaller carbon footprint. For food especially, recyclable plastic packaging is probably the best option.
Nishtha Manchanda
B.A. (H) Economics, 1st Year
If you look around, plastic is everywhere and in everything, even the seemingly natural cotton t-shirt you’re wearing is held together with stronger, cheaper polyester threads. The huge problem with plastics is that they take up a lot of space and are non-biodegradable. They are also hard to recycle. They cannot be purified by re-melting process like glass and metal.
Plastics may have many benefits and a multitude of amazing applications but the fact remains; we have become the first and only species on the planet to produce mountains, quite literally, of non-biodegradable waste.
In the broad expanse of the northern Pacific Ocean, there exists the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a slowly moving, clockwise spiral of currents created by a high-pressure system of air currents which besides planktons contains trash, millions of pounds of it, most of which is plastic. It's the largest landfill in the world, except that it floats in the middle of the ocean. It is also better known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or the Trash Vortex.
This toxic soup of debris estimated to be at least twice the size of Texas and mostly contains tiny pea sized particles of plastic, almost impossible to clean-up. This debris is responsible for the death of an estimated 100,000 marine mammals a year. And these deaths are not limited to the North Pacific.
Environmentalists examined stomachs of juvenile turtles found off the coast of Argentina. The bellyful of debris that they found is symptomatic of the increasing threat to the sea turtles from this human addiction to plastic. Yes. Humans, and humans alone are responsible for this.
Sea turtles often mistake plastic items for jellyfish or other food. Ingesting non-biodegradable ocean pollution causes a digestive blockage and internal wounds. The result is serious loss of energy, followed by death.
Millions of albatross inhabiting Kure and Midway atolls in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands National Monument search for food here and scavenge whatever they can to feed their chicks. A four-month old Laysan Albatross chick died with plastic in its stomach. A large number of the goose-sized chicks are dying with stomachs full of bottle caps and other rubbish, like cigarette lighters. Sadly, their parents mistake bottle caps for food tossing about in the ocean surface.
Every one of us has an obligation to think about what we throw away. There are many potential solutions that realise the creative potential in waste but making them viable and available takes time, commitment and collaboration.
Humans currently produce 260 million tons of plastic a year. When those products are pulled into the sea's currents, the plastics do not biodegrade but are broken into smaller pieces which are consumed by marine life at the bottom of the food chain.
The biggest misunderstanding people have on this issue is that they think the ocean is like a lake and we can go out with nets and just clean it up. People find it difficult to grasp the true size of the oceans and the fact that most of this plastic is in tiny pieces and it's everywhere.
Straining the ocean for plastic would be beyond the budget of any country and it might kill incalculable amounts of sea life in the process. The solution is to stop the plastic at its source: stop it on land before it falls in the ocean. And in a plastic-wrapped and packaged world, one doesn't hold out much hope for that, either.
In general terms, it is clear what we need to do about plastic. Since it is made from oil, which will run out in our lifetimes and get more expensive as it does, we have to start re-using plastic and designing it for re-use. At present only a few of our many hundred plastics can simply be melted down and moulded into something else; the rest are cross-contaminated with other chemicals and types of plastic. But the billion- dollar plastic industry is tooled for virgin plastic and resistant to change.
For consumers, the easiest way to make a difference is to give up plastic shopping bags and plastic water bottles, which contribute more to plastic pollution than any other products. Then comes plastic packaging, which is a little more complicated. It is easy to point out examples of excessive packaging, but plastic does have the virtue of being lighter than paper, cardboard and glass, which gives it a smaller carbon footprint. For food especially, recyclable plastic packaging is probably the best option.
Nishtha Manchanda
B.A. (H) Economics, 1st Year