why should we avoid plastic
Answers
Explanation:
Because they are so lightweight, plastic bags get easily picked up by wind and travel long distances by wind and water to pollute the nature. Plastic bag litter has even caused great problems in some areas.
Answer:
We should not reduce the use of plastics (except for single use packaging, this should be reduced) but change the plastics we use. Plastics have many advantages compared to other materials:
they use comparatively little energy to produce (compared to metals);
they are durable so we don’t have to use energy to replace objects too often (compared to non-treated wood);
they are not degraded in normal conditions so they don’t need nasty preservative (like in wood) but some can still be degraded when needed (aerobic composting, enzymes, etc.)
they can be tailored to have a large range of characteristics, making them very versatile;
when produced from natural materials, such as starch, surgars or proteins, they are a good way to capture carbon;
but the long term durability of the most common plastics is a serious problem when we don’t need an object anymore, plus some plastics are not recyclable at all and most can only be recycled a few times.
However, some bioplastics (for example starch plastics, PLA) have all the advantages of common plastics and none of the inconvenients. They are durable in normal conditions but biodegradable in aerobic composting, and they can be indefinitely recycled through depolymerization/repolymerization.
Bioplastics can also be derived from crude oil, and producing plastics from crude oil is not neccessarily a bad thing. Of course, they won’t contribute to carbon capture but they will also avoid the deforestation that a large demand for natural products will cause. Plus, since plastics only use about 7% of the crude oil we produce, if we were only using crude oil for plastics (or petro-chemistry in general), the existing oil reserves would last centuries. Using crude oil is only a problem because we burn too much of it, releasing too quickly carbon that was captured over millions of year. However, switching completely to natural products will also be a problem because it will need too much agricultural surface and lead to massive deforestation (just growing food is already a problem).
So, we shouldn’t simply reduce the use of plastics, as we will need to replace it with other materials which can be even more damageable for the environment. We should just switch to better plastics. Starch plastics and PLA are already commonly used and not much more expensive than other common plastics, and we are just starting to discover the realm of biodegradable and/or indefinitely recyclable plastics that are possible to create.
See the picture for reference!
