Plastic waste is a by-product of urban lifestyle and is considered as a necessary evil. Provide your critical views on this statement, focusing on utility of plastic in the growth of urban lifestyle and impacts of plastic waste on the environmenta (including humans) in 1000 words.
Answers
From stone to metal and from metal to non-metal, we have covered a long distance in the journey of human civilisaton. Confused? (It seems that you were not attentive enough in your history class!) Let’s take a quick recap: Stone Age was the first stage of the human civilisation, which led to the Bronze Age and then came the Iron Age (both are metals). And today, we are in the age of plastics (a non-metal).
Plastic is cheap, sterile and convenient and its invention changed our lives. But it also makes us unhappy at the same time. Plastic may seem indispensible, but we still do not know what to do with plastic waste. To cut a long story short, plastic is a necessary evil. But the story of this “necessary evil” is actually a crime thriller, or you may say a thriller turned into a crime. For most of our history, humans used materials found in nature to build things we needed, including plastic. Rubber is a natural plastic but unlike rubber, synthetic plastic is a product of petroleum.
The word petroleum comes from the Latin petra, meaning “rock” and oleum, meaning “oil”.Oil and gas are formed from remains of prehistoric plants and animals. These remains were settled at the ocean floor. Over ages, the layers of the organic material were compressed under the weight of the sediments above them. The increase in pressure and temperature in the absence of oxygen changed the organic matter into a substance called Kerogen which eventually transformed into petroleum and natural gas and as a by-product of petroleum came plastic.