Plastic World or Plastic-Free World?

[marmar]

Plastic World or Plastic-Free World?
The plastic crisis is tied not only to ecological destruction, but also drives systemic injustice. With plastic’s fall, will we rise?

ERICA CIRINO


(YES! Magazine) By the time I set out in 2016 with a crew of volunteer researchers to sail an old steel sloop named Christianshavn to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, public perception of plastic had shifted away from its longtime reputation as a modern human-made miracle to something more sinister.

My first thought as we entered the Garbage Patch was that we’d gone off course. After passing through rough waters outside the clockwise-spinning North Pacific Gyre, where the patch is located, we did not encounter the floating dump of human detritus we’d expected. Instead, we sailed through what seemed like clean blue sea, growing calmer the further we sailed west, away from Los Angeles, toward Honolulu.

Before long, one of the sailors, Danish plastic expert Malene Møhl, called the crew’s attention to the waters beneath our ship, which revealed an even more dangerous situation as the sea seemed to shape-shift before our eyes. As the waters calmed, we could see the Garbage Patch was not so much a mass of trash but a soup: the shredded corner of a sun-bleached orange plastic fish crate, a fist-sized chunk of white Styrofoam, a green shampoo bottle, a pink dustpan.

....(snip)....



How did we get here?

People have long had a proclivity for accumulating stuff, which, beyond mere utility, can confer messages about one’s wealth, status, and view of the world. The first mass-produced plastic, celluloid, used natural organic materials from trees and cotton: camphor and nitrocellulose. It was invented in the late 1800s to bypass inherent limits on materials available in nature—specifically ivory, which was becoming scarcer with every elephant slaughtered. Until then, ivory, tortoiseshell, horn, and other animal parts were used to make popular consumer products, particularly valuable items seen as luxuries, such as jewelry, furniture, and art.

Though celluloid could be formed into a variety of products, from photographic film to table-tennis balls, it was not exactly the ideal consumer material industrialists had hoped for: It could be tricky to mold consistently, and tended to lose its shape when reheated. Plus, celluloid proved to be extremely flammable. Then came Bakelite, the world’s first synthetic plastic, created in 1907 by Belgian inventor Leo Baekeland. ................(more)

https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/solving-plastic/2021/05/10/plastic-free-world