Living without plastics

5 simple actions to limit our usage of plastics

Plastic: the panacea or a plague?

Plastic is an extraordinary invention. There are a multitude of different plastics that fulfill various functions in our daily lives. Resistant, flexible or rigid as needed, multicolored, watertight and / or airtight, and especially very cheap, it is omnipresent in our daily lives. Thanks to it, our living comfort has greatly improved during the last decades.

Plastic is so practical that it is everywhere, and so abundant and cheap that we do not bother to reuse it: today it is an abundant product for single use, disposable.

The main quality of plastic is its resistance to all aggressive agents and therefore its very long life. This is also its main disadvantage: it does not break down in nature. It is estimated that it takes 400 years to more than 1000 years for plastic to degrade in the environment.

Clearly, plastic has enormous benefits, well used in all areas of industry and daily life. But the way it has been used, "consumed" so far has made it one of the worst scourges that threaten the environment today.

Each year about 300 million tons of plastic are produced, over 80% of which arrive in the wild after use. Currently an estimated 12 million tonnes of plastic arrive in the oceans each year [Greenpeace and WWF data]. The oceans are in fact the bottom of the garbage can: what accumulates there can not go elsewhere. We are now talking about islands and plastic continents that float on the 5 oceans of the planet (the "gyres").

Plastic enters the food chain via the microorganisms that consume them. Fish and marine mammals consume these microorganisms or directly pieces of plastic. This plastic, by successive assimilations in the food chain, ends finally in the food consumed by human beings. Their toxicity contaminates everyone who consumes them, it has become a danger to health beyond a plague for the environment.

It is therefore essential to limit immediately and even in the short term to completely eliminate the arrival of plastic in the environment.

The rules to follow are simple:

1. First of all, I refuse plastic, especially in packaging.

2. I consider and choose sustainable alternatives

3. I reuse plastic, when I can't avoid its use.

4. I recycle, it's better than throwing away, but it's not a solution to everything.…

5. I put the biodegradable plastic back into the compost, ideally industrial compost

Recycling: the solution to everything?

To throw without polluting, it would be enough to recycle! This seems like a good solution: technically all plastics are recyclable.

In practice, however, recycling channels must exist and collection must be organized. This is far from the case everywhere, and for all plastics. Indeed, the very low cost of plastic production compared to the relatively high cost of recycling means that few plastics are actually recycled - it is estimated that only 9% of the plastic produced is currently recycled. In addition, current processes are not able to recycle dirty plastics. Finally, the recycling of most plastics degrades their quality which requires the addition of new plastics during recycling to ensure sufficient quality (min 30%).

Recycling must be encouraged and stimulated. Only if the quantities to be recycled are sufficient can this process become "profitable". However 100% recycling is not possible, and this will not eliminate the need for new plastic.

Recycling is great, but it's not a solution to everything.

Biodegradability, isn't it the solution?

It would be good ! But…

Biodegradable means that which decomposes naturally under the action of natural external agents such as microorganisms, bacteria and fungi, oxygen, the sun, etc. The effective biodegradability of materials can be measured according to precise standards. However, current standards rarely take into account actual temperature and humidity conditions in natural environments, making the "biodegradable" qualification unreliable enough to determine whether a product will disappear naturally into the environment under the action of these external agents.

Moreover, one must not neglect the time dimension. Biodegradability can only be defined on a time scale, otherwise almost any material can be declared "biodegradable". In general, correctly labeled products indicate the level of degradation expected after a certain time (for example: "90% of the product has disappeared after 6 months"). However, this does not guarantee that this will really be the case in a natural environment because the actual circumstances always vary with the circumstances of the tests. In addition, no information is provided on the time required for a total disappearance of the product.

A special biodegradability condition is compost: a situation of material degradation in particular circumstances of humidity and temperature, combined with human intervention.

Today, we are producing "biodegradable" plastics. These must be returned to industrial compost in order to be recovered as waste. Some plastic bags bear the label "Compost - OK HOME" indicating that they can degrade in a home compost. In particular, this label confirms with tests that the product can deteriorate in 6 months in a domestic compost without generation of substances harmful to plants or residues of heavy metals.

Odoo • une photo avec une légende — Certification logo indicating that the plastic bag can be thrown into a home compost

The actual performance of this biodegradability is still very variable and leaves much to be desired: a recent study from the University of Plymouth (UK, April 2019) showed that supposedly biodegradable bags were still intact after remaining 3 years in the water sea or buried in the ground ...

As for them, compostable bags were still present in the soil, but too fragile to be used, or had disappeared after 3 months in seawater. No information is however available about decomposition products and their potential persistent toxicity.

Relying on nature to remove our plastic waste is an illusion, evidence abounds everywhere you look.

The only solution, urgent and accessible to all, is to refuse the use of plastic wherever possible. And that starts with packaging and disposable containers.

Les alternatives au plastique respectueuses de l’environnement existent et sont abordables. Le verre, l’inox sont des matériaux durables, solides, et recyclables à 100% sans dégradation avec des filières rentables bien établies.

Le bambou, le coton, la cire sont d’autres alternatives pour d’autres usages.

Bioplastics will be discussed in a future blog.

Useful sources and references:

Biodegradable polymers: a solution to plastic waste or just an important step towards circular economy?

Tom Collin

MChem Polymer essay, University of Surrey, May 2019

Interactive “beat the plasics” presentation

The United Nations Environment Programme (UN Environment) website

https://www.unenvironment.org/interactive/beat-plastic-pollution/

Many authored publications on plastics in oceans from UN, BBC, National Geographic and others

World oceans day organization website

https://www.worldoceansday.org/plastic-pollution-resources-1