Look around you, and what do you see? If you are in or around a modern building, vehicle or other man-made structure then the chances are that you will be able to see some plastic. I can see a printer, a scanner, some speakers, a desk tidy, CD cases, a clothes airer, some video cases, a moulded plug, a keyboard, mouse and monitor case. Can you imagine these things without plastic existing?

If we were to remove plastic from our world then modern society would, literally, fall apart. The use of oil, synthetic chemicals, plastics and high technology form a cluster of things around which we have built modern society, and which most of us could probably not imagine living without.

So what is the problem with plastic?

According to the UK group Waste Online the annual global production of plastic is around 100 million tonnes per year. When combined with the energy required to extract and process the oil to make raw plastic pellets this is equivalent to about 200 million tonnes of oil; or about 4% of the world’s annual oil production. Although this is a large amount of raw material, when compared to aluminium, a product with many of the more useful properties of plastic – durability, lightness, flexibility – it is a mere stripling. Aluminium requires 4 tonnes of bauxite to produce one tonne of base metal, and vastly more energy than plastics require. It is also worth bearing in mind that for every tonne of oil required to make the plastic, only half of that will be emitted as carbon dioxide; the rest is locked away in the plastic for hundreds of years.

So that doesn’t seem to be the problem with plastic.

The durability of plastic, though, leads to another issue. Litter is a nuisance; it clogs up streets and waterways, it spreads itself around wild areas, it can trap wildlife, causing pain and death, notably through choking and garrotting. Because plastic is so durable it persists far longer than most other forms of litter. A thin plastic carrier bag will last for anything from 20 to 1000 years; a drainpipe or child’s toy, probably longer – and we will not know exactly how long until far in the future, by which time much of our planet will surely be choking on plastic waste. But plastic is also inert and can be easily tidied up and contained. Heavy metals, toxic chemical sludge, fertilisers, all of which poison soil and water, cannot be so easily contained as plastic. Even simple kitchen and garden waste will break down quickly to form carbon dioxide and methane. Plastic does none of this so quickly and so damagingly. And most types of plastic can be recycled with great efficiency, reducing the use of raw materials in the long run.

So that doesn’t seem to be the problem with plastic.

When the British supermarket chain Sainsburys announced that they would be cutting their use of oil based plastics and promoting compostable materials instead, Sainsburys were rightly given praise for their efforts in reducing landfill. What they failed to do was point out that, rather than significantly reduce the amount of packaging used on their goods, some would be replaced by biodegradable materials, and the majority would be untouched by this policy. In both of the previous “problems” with plastic it is not the nature of plastic that is the real issue, but the sheer quantity of, and the dependency we have on, the plastics we use.

The Problem With Plastic is that is has made the disposable economy possible. Much of the modern world is addicted to the very things that plastic is good at
being, and as a consequence we are just consuming too much of everything that is related to plastic.

Take a conventional television, for example. The tube is made from glass – it has to be – and there are a large number of micro-electronic components within it, but the majority of what makes up the television itself is plastic. In 2000 there were 243 million televisions in the USA, 1 for every 1.2 people.

A Barbie Doll is made from plastic and around 100 million are sold each year. Compared to a wooden doll it is far more flexible and far cheaper to make, as is all the packaging that surrounds that doll when you buy it.

During the last football World Cup, in England alone the aforementioned Sainsburys were expecting to sell 750,000 plastic flags out of a probable 30-40 million overall.

The thing that strikes you when you read the figures is not so much that plastic is heavily used in these 3 items, but the sheer numbers. 100 million Barbie dolls a year!

When you compare the ease of making something from plastic, compared to making the same thing from an alternate material then two striking things come to
light.

Firstly, some things that we take for granted are relatively difficult or expensive to make from plastic. These are often things that many of us would not even care to have, let alone use in any great quantity if western commercial enterprise hadn’t convinced us that they are good things to have; such as plastic flags, plastic kettles, plastic bottles of Coca Cola and daily bio-drinks, plastic bags, plastic children’s cars…it really is a list that is getting longer as I type these words.

To take just three common items; most clothing sold in the world now has an element of plastic – nylon, polyester, acrylic – to make it easier to wash, iron and produce in a highly mechanised manner; 35% of the plastic used in the UK is in packaging, because it is cheap, easily shaped, light and transparent when required; finally, children’s toys can be produced in quite astonishing numbers – McDonalds alone give away around 1.5 billion toys every year. Switching to
alternative materials such as metal, wood and natural fabrics to provide both the qualities and the quantities of these goods would be immensely difficult. Switching to alternative materials at the same cost would impossible.

Secondly, even if it were possible to produce the same quantity of goods, how would it be possible to maintain this level of production sustainably? If 1.5 billion small toys per year were produced from wood, added to the enormous amount of additional card required for packaging the world’s consumer goods, the already scarce ancient forests of the world would be decimated. The millions of tonnes of wool, hemp, jute, cotton and other natural materials required to replace synthetic materials would require immense amounts of land, fertiliser, pesticides (the world is not about to go organic overnight) and animal feed would severely cut into our food supplies and, ironically, future supplies of “bio fuels”. If all consumer items were made from metals, glass and natural substances, such as vulcanised rubber, not only would they be heavier to transport and more expensive to produce, the metals mined would require a huge acceleration in damaging hard rock mining, and in some cases the products would not be safe enough to sell to the public. Sometimes plastic is the only answer.

But if plastic is the only answer to our current appetite, what happens as oil starts to run out and the cost of plastic rises? Are we prepared to curb our consumer appetite for cheap, plentiful goods, or will we defend to the hilt our “rights” as consumers to have whatever we want, whatever the consequences?

In the end it may our greed for the symbols of the consumer society that sign the death knell for both plastic, and the lives we have become so used to.