Plastic Pollution: The What & The Why.

Written By: Isaac Aladejayan

Earth is faced with a huge pollution problem, on land, in the air and in our water bodies. Plastics are said to be one of the chief contributors to this pollution problem and this written piece will be focused on this pollutant.

Wikipedia defines Plastics as a wide range of synthetic and semi synthetic organic compounds
that are malleable and so can be molded into solid objects.
Our oceans are home to over 1 million species of animals and also in our oceans we can find over 150 million metric tons of plastic waste of which 8 million metric tons of wastes join them every year. This is a constant source of discomfort to ocean life as plastics shrink their ecosystem and sometimes fishes ingest plastics that are in tiny fractions, some fishes also swim around with plastic bags over their face.

In 2019, via a National Geographic report, 40 kilograms of plastic waste was found in the stomach of a dead whale, taking up space in its stomach and forever serving as a source of discomfort throughout its lifetime. When plastics get ingested by animals, they cannot by digested or passed out as stool so they remain in the gut throughout the lifecycle of the animal and are only released back into the environment when the animal is dead and decayed.

Plastics are synthesized from petrochemicals which are chemicals obtained from petroleum refining. These petrochemicals are responsible for the chemical properties of plastics like their large molecular mass, presence of this large molecular mass makes plastics very difficult to biodegrade, sometimes taking over 100 years.
Plastics have a number of uses to humans, they are used in:

Packaging
Children toys
Kitchen utensils
Automobiles
Building

Plastics have several uses that cut across all forms of life which makes their demand high and in turn jacks up production. The principal problem with plastics is that they do not biodegrade easily and this is a big problem for the environment. Plastics are produced in large amounts per year and according to Plasticoceans.org , 300 million tons of plastics are produced every year, with 50% of them for single use purposes.

Part of the many challenges posed by plastics is the improper ways people dispose them as they end up in dumps and drainages before they eventually wash down into our oceans.

Plastics can be disposed properly by use of landfills, incineration, and by recycling.

Landfill involves digging up the earth and emptying waste into them. Landfill is not a long term solution as traditional plastics simply remain in the soil and degrade very slowly especially now in the absence of air and moisture.
Incineration is also another method which has its challenges as it means converting waste on land into waste in the air. It involves releasing a lot of Carbon dioxide into the atmosphere; we can’t create another pollutant while trying to dispose another.
Of the various disposal methods discussed for plastics, Recycling seems to be the most reasonable so I will explain it extensively. Wikipedia defines Recycling as the process of converting waste materials into new materials and objects. It also defines Plastic Recycling as the process of recovering scrap or waste plastic and reprocessing the material into useful products.

Plastics can be recycled because of a property they possess called Plasticity, which is defined by as the general property of all materials which can deform irreversibly without breaking. This means that plastics can be broken into simple forms and built back up. Recycling helps reduce the need to produce newer plastics. Recycling however doesn’t come without its challenges. When plastics are melted down and remolded, the structural integrity of the recycled plastic is inferior to the original plastic making it inferior in quality.

To maintain the quality of recycled plastics, newer plastics have to be added to them, meaning more plastics are made while trying to dispose plastics (Wikipedia). Also plastics can only be recycled about 2 or 3 times before it becomes unusable (Wikipedia) This means production of new plastics is almost inevitable.

Plastic recycling involves a lot steps like

Collection
Sorting (Not all plastics are the same)
Washing (Dirty plastics can’t be recycled)
Resizing
Identification and separation
Compounding (Greentumble.com)

These steps can sometimes drive up the cost of recycling plastics and as plastic is synthesized from petrochemicals & production cost is affected by oil prices in the market. The implications of this is that at times when the price of oil in the market is low, the cost of the making new plastics is actually lower than recycling, and as we have seen several times over the year, some people will prefer to line their pockets than protect the planet.

Recycling is said to be the go to method for managing plastic waste but the reality is very different. National Geographic reports that 91% of plastics are not recycled. This is a very worrying statistic coupled with the fact that plastic production is still at a very high rate (300 million metric tons per year).
Plastic with its various uses is bad news from every angle but these are some useful means to properly manage the problem. Science thankfully hasn’t folded its hands on this issue, plastics now can be synthesized from other materials that are kinder to our environment, and this brings us to two classes of plastics namely; Bioplastics and Biodegradable plastics.
Bioplastics are plastics are that are made from organic materials like starch, straw, woodchips, maize. They are made from materials commonly found in nature and they degrade.

Biodegradable plastics are plastics made from petrochemicals that are eco-friendly and degrade faster than traditional plastics. These two plastics are often used interchangeably but this is wrong as not every Bioplastic is biodegradable, so you will be wrong to use the names in place of each other.

Like you would have already guessed Bioplastics and Biodegradable plastics are not all good news, so let us quickly go through the cons.

Bioplastics are made from plant produce, and if these plastics find their way to the oceans, they sometimes smell like food to the animals that inhabit the oceans prompting these plastics to be consumed and since not all Bioplastics biodegrade, it clogs in the animal’s gut for a long
time. Also if crops and land meant to help in curbing hunger are used in the production of plastics we would be worsening a problem (Hunger) while trying to solve another.

When Bioplastics are buried in landfills, they give off methane gas on decomposition and methane gas hurts the ozone layer.
Biodegradable plastics when they do degrade, may at times leave small toxic residues behind which can be ingested by animals in the ocean sometimes these plastics make their way to our water bodies and the water is in the ocean is sometimes too cold for the plastics to degrade so these plastics float on the surface forever, blinding fishes and clogging up their insides when ingested.

Other methods put forward by science has been the discovery of a plastic eating strain of bacteria
Pseudomonas putida, this strain of bacteria can consume plastics as a source of carbon, nitrogen and energy (CNN). As we know bacteria’s are micro organisms and plastics can be as big a 500L water tank so the effects of bacteria on the degradation of plastic is expected to be minimal.

Another organism that can degrade plastic is the Wax-worm caterpillar.
We shouldn’t leave this fight to Science and micro organisms alone as this affects us all. We can also contribute in our own small ways in the following steps,