Waste Series: Part 5: Plastics

by Mia de Castro

August 7, 2020

For the next part in this series, I wanted to cover one of the most harmful materials that we waste daily: plastic. The average American throws away 185 pounds of plastic each year, making it one of the largest materials that we waste. Yet it is not only the colossal amount of waste that plastic produces but also the several detrimental environmental and health effects that makes plastic a large issue when it comes to waste.

Plastic is an affordable and accessible material that we use in our everyday lives from plastic single-use coffee cups to our seat belt fasteners to many of our clothes. However, the issue with plastic is not its use in long term products, like the seat belt fasteners above, but its use in short term, disposable products, like the single-use coffee cups. Ultimately, these single-use and short term plastics make up the majority of plastics in our landfills and oceans, and are also more easily preventable.

There has been more awareness about the harms of plastic to our environment with the rise of zero-waste lifestyles, but some of the dangers are still unclear.

Moreover, a threat of plastics that more directly harms us is its inability to biodegrade. Biodegradable materials are “capable of being decomposed by bacteria or other living organisms” (Oxford Dictionary). Yet plastic does not biodegrade and instead continues to break down until it forms microplastics, which are plastic debris that are less than 5 millimeters in length.

Microplastics originate from both larger pieces of plastic that break down over time and from small beads commonly used in beauty products for exfoliation, known as “microbeads”.

Although the extent to which ingested microplastics hurt our health is unclear, these small pieces of plastics are evidently harmful, especially because we ingest so much plastic; we consume about 5 grams, or the equivalent of a credit card’s worth, of plastic each week. Along with plastic, we also take in its dangerous chemicals from phthalates, bisphenols, and polychlorinated biphenyls: all of which have been linked to health complications.

These pejorative effects are clearly not limited to humans, as our contact with microplastics is fairly limited in comparison to that of marine life, whose oceanic habitats are heavily polluted with plastic. Specifically, there are approximately 46,000 pieces of plastic per square mile in our oceans, 80% of which is from land.

Plastic is found inside 90% of seabirds and inside over half of the world’s sea turtles. The consumption of plastics in marine life can cause digestive tract issues, slow poisoning from chemicals and malnutrition. Furthermore, seabirds and other ocean life are more susceptible to mistakenly consuming these plastics since the plastics become coated with algae that releases a sulfur compound dimethylsulfoniopropionate (DMSP) which attracts sea life. Microplastics also pose a fatal threat to zooplankton that are a vital part of food chains. At the current rate, the mass of plastic debris is said to outweigh the mass of ocean life in 2050.

Among other negatives, floating plastics can transport invasive species; chemicals from plastics can contaminate groundwater; and plastics use oil, which then uses GHGs, to be produced.

It is clear that plastics have many negative effects on not only our environment, but also us. We have been failing to properly recycle our plastic (only about 8% of plastics were recycled in 2017) and our plastic consumption has not seen a downward trend. It is imperative that we start taking responsibility by limiting our plastic consumption and by properly recycling or reusing plastics.

There are a plethora of sustainable swabs we can make in our daily lives to cut down on our plastic consumption, from switching to reusable water bottles to opting for paper and/or reusable grocery bags. Indeed, more and more sustainable swaps are reaching the market everyday and I hope to explore these swaps later on to provide tips on living a more sustainable and eco-friendly lifestyle.