Is it far fetched to think that plastic is one of the most damaging inventions of the 20th century? I imagine it will be affecting us for hundreds of years. Banning single use plastics seems like a no brainer to me at this point.
I think plastic is a true miracle invention. Aviation, medicine, technology, there probably isn't an area where we haven't benefited from this great material. Used properly, it's not a problem.
What is damaging is the brute ugliness of modern materialism. We don't just use plastic to manufacture surgical tools, we use it to make plastic toy that we ship halfway round the world to give away with an equally repugnant 'happy meal' from McDonalds. Then we throw it away (hopefully into a bin) along with all its plastic wrapping.
That's not to say I don't agree with you - I massively support a ban on throw away plastic too (and more). I just think we need to be careful about demonising plastic as a material.
Alternatively, ban non recyclable/biodegradable garbage. Make the suppliers take back refuse as condition for selling, no longer can suppliers think of the waste as externalised cost.
Quickly, distributor countries would solve garbage problem as every country returns plastic, metal, tires, etc that is not biodegradable/recycable. As we saw, some countries absolutely does not want to deal with the garbage from other countries that goods are shipped to. They know it costs so much to deal with that it's better for other countries to internalise the cost.
You would still have your plastic benefits and without worrying about the impact on environment.
It would be impossible to say, without knowing the numbers - both of damage, as well as constructive, healing, or life-saving purposes.
For instance - think of all the things plastics have made possible, that no other material is capable of (or works as well). I'm thinking things like medical implants, as well as more mundane things like adhesives and tapes, and products based on those - for instance, how much infection have bandaids helped to prevent?
Then there's clothing, automotive interiors lessening injury in accidents, as well as use as a material that is lighter weight to lower fuel consumption for a variety of vehicles, among other uses.
I don't think you can paint plastics completely in a terrible light, just like you can't nuclear radiation, and any number of other things.
At worst, they are all double-edged swords, and we must as a species either decide to get rid of them entirely, or learn to use them properly. In the case of plastics, I doubt that the former will be the route we take for a variety of reasons - mainly though because their benefits seem to far outweigh their detriments (unless and until we have hard numbers for both, though, that's as unsupported as your original proposed claim - but it seems like that's what we've mostly decided).
So we need to learn how to better process and manufacture them, how to better manage their shipping and transportation, and how we dispose or recycle them (whatever that ultimately means).
I guess it raises the question, damaging to whom? Humans as a whole are certainly better off, at least for now, because of plastics. The natural world, however, is much worse off. Not just because of the direct results of plastic pollution, but also all the extra economic activity and human life saved you mention. All of that has lead to pollution and habitat destruction.
There's enough important applications for single use plastics (keeping medical equipment sterile before use, for example) that I'd hate to see an outright ban.
However, I think we should be seriously be considering a cap-and-trade approach to managing it.
This could also be a tool to get corporations to use recycled material effectively. Post-consumer recycled material could either not count against the quota, or could be counted at a different rate than "virgin" plastic.
I'll be somewhat contrarian to the popular view, and say that making things biodegradable is even worse because it's essentially planned obolescence; the manufacturers continue to consume resources for producing products which are guaranteed to self-destruct.
The real problem is that people don't seem to appreciate just how amazingly durable plastics are (or the companies try to dissuade that in order to ensure their revenue stream...), and instead waste them carelessly.
> Is it far fetched to think that plastic is one of the most damaging inventions of the 20th century?
Well, given the vast range of utility and the fact that plastics have been in use for over 3000 years, probably (both the word “plastics” as a label for them and fully synthetic plastics are early 20th century inventions, though.)
Plastic in ocean gives extreme insensitive to bacteria or other life forms to come with way to consume it for energy. If something will come up with necessary enzymes and reactions, then not only we will end up without plastic, but perhaps without oil as well in a world polluted by byproducts of that plastic consumption that may not be compatible with human life.
> Plastic in ocean gives extreme insensitive to bacteria or other life forms to come with way to consume it for energy.
That's just not very likely to happen from a basic chemistry point of view.
Plastic tends to be quite stable--that's the whole point. However, that stability means that there is almost nothing to be gained by breaking plastic down--certainly not energy. And, in the ocean, practically everything plastic could provide when broken down is far more abundant and easier to access by other means.
Consequently, there is no good reason to evolve the ability to consume plastic.
Plastics burns and releases a lot of energy during that process. In that regard its energy density is similar to wood. The problem is that compared with cellulose the life has not figured out how to harvest the energy of plastic oxidation at the room temperature. But there is no law that prevents that.
Given that amount of plastic waste that humans put into the ocean is already on the scale comparable with a mass of a lot of fish species, an organism that can consume it can have a nice evolutionary advantage.
And, yet, that bacterium isn't consuming and breaking down all the PET around it (It was isolated outside a bottling facility, after all. It should spread like wildfire.).
Why?
Because the energy expended to break down the plastic means that it is outcompeted by the bacteria who get their materials by other means unless plastic is the only thing available.
In the ocean, there is always lots of other things available.
Perhaps this will turn out like the evolution of lignin-modifying enzymes, but those took a LONG time to come about even while lignin is far less stable than most plastics.
> What usage lifetime justifies the total lifetime of a plastic object?
Probably depends on if you're having to justify it to someone who wants to 100% ban all plastic or someone who wants a silly phone simply because they like Garfield.
The value of reusable plastic devices in a pollution sense is less that the device will be ~20 years older by the time it's thrown away, but rather that there will be so much less plastic used overall than if disposable devices were used for that purpose for that time.
Plastic that's been buried in a landfill won't show up in the ocean. Plastic that's been burnt in incinerators won't show up in the ocean. As this story shows, if plastic finds its way into the ocean, it's because people had loaded it onto ships and dropped it there.
No, cars are. A million people directly killed every single year, another million killed by pollution. Roads everywhere. Killing animals. Huge industry polluting. Mining. Oil. Oil spills. etc...
