8 billion...and counting

The world, as of January 2023, has 8 billion people.

Per capita plastic consumption in India reached?15 kilograms per person?in 2021. The demand for polymers has been steadily growing over the past three decades, rising from just one kilogram per capita in 1990. Overall, plastics consumption in India reached almost 21 million tons in 2021.

The?United States?produces the most plastic waste per capita worldwide, with the average American producing 130.09 kilograms of plastic waste per year.

Belgian chemist and clever marketeer Leo Baekeland pioneered the first fully synthetic plastic in?1907. This is to remind that the world started using plastic hardly One hundred years back.

Since then, the per capita usage of plastic has increased exponentially.

His invention, which he would christen Bakelite, combined two chemicals, formaldehyde and phenol, under heat and pressure.?

Bakelite sparked a consumer boom in affordable?yet highly desirable?products. It had a dark brown, wood-like appearance but could be easily mass-produced, making it ideal for bringing?new design trends?such as Art Deco?to the masses.

In the early decades of the 20th century, the petroleum and chemical industries began to form alliances in companies like Dow Chemicals, ExxonMobil, DuPont and BASF. These companies are still the major producers of raw material resins for the plastics industry today.

These alliances were driven by the desire to make use of waste material from processing crude oil and natural gas. One of the most abundant of these was ethylene gas, a by-product that the British company Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) beat its German and US competitors to make a plastic from.

Formed in 1926, ICI had its first big plastic success with Perspex in 1932.

The following year, a team at ICI’s plant in Winnington were attempting to combine ethylene and benzaldehyde under great pressure and heat. The experiment failed. Instead, due to a leak of oxygen into the vessel, they found a white waxy substance?in a reaction tube.

This was found to be a polymer of ethylene. Now the world’s most abundant plastic, polyethylene was a wonder material: strong, flexible and heat-resistant.

To understand the magnitude of input of plastics to the natural environment and the world’s oceans, we must understand various elements of the plastic production, distribution and waste management chain. This is crucial, not only in understanding the scale of the problem but in implementing the most effective interventions for reduction.

In the year 2010:

• global primary production of plastic was 270 million tonnes;
• global plastic waste was 275 million tonnes – it did exceed annual primary production through wastage of plastic from previous years;
• plastic waste generated in coastal regions is most at risk of entering the oceans; in 2010 coastal plastic waste – generated within 50 kilometres of the coastline – amounted to 99.5 million tonnes;
• only plastic waste which is improperly managed (mismanaged) is at significant risk of leakage to the environment; in 2010 this amounted to 31.9 million tonnes;
• of this, 8 million tonnes – 3% of global annual plastics waste – entered the ocean (through multiple outlets, including rivers);
• Plastics in the oceans’ surface waters is several orders of magnitude lower than annual ocean plastic inputs. This discrepancy is known as the ‘missing plastic problem’.
• The amount of plastic in surface waters is not very well known: estimates range from 10,000s to 100,000s tonnes.

In 1950 the world produced only 2 million tonnes per year. Since then, annual production has increased nearly 230-fold, reaching 460 million tonnes in 2019.

The?chemical properties that have made plastic an incredibly useful and durable material also make it difficult to dispose of, with some types taking thousands—even tens of thousands—of years to degrade in landfill.?

The degradation itself is an even bigger environmental issue, as the breaking down of plastics into microscopic particles pollutes our ocean, air and ecosystems. The health implications of microplastic deposits in our bodies are not yet fully known.??

One of the biggest barriers to plastic recycling is separation: when different polymers are mixed, the resulting material does not usually have useful properties. Even two PET items, a drinks bottle and cookie cutter, for example, may have different melting temperatures that produce an unusable sludge when combined.

At the moment, chemical means of sorting plastics like spectroscopic analysis are not economically viable on a big scale, so it’s down to human sorters to do the job.?

The solution to the plastic problem will be a social and political one.

Reducing pollution from plastics will require action, and international co-operation, to reduce plastic production, including through innovation, better product design and developing environmentally friendly alternatives, as well as efforts to improve waste management and increase recycling.

Bans and taxes on single-use plastics exist in more than 120 countries but are not doing enough to reduce overall pollution. Most regulations are limited to items like plastic bags, which make up a tiny share of plastic waste, and are more effective at reducing littering than curbing plastics consumption.

Landfill and incineration taxes that incentivize recycling only exist in a minority of countries.

The Outlook calls for greater use of instruments such as Extended Producer Responsibility schemes for packaging and durables, landfill taxes, deposit-refund and Pay-as-You-Throw systems.

Globally only 9% of plastic waste is recycled while 22% is mismanaged. Most plastics in use today are virgin – or primary – plastics, made from crude oil or gas. Global production of plastics from recycled – or secondary – plastics has more than quadrupled from 6.8 million tonnes (Mt) in 2000 to 29.1 Mt in 2019, but this is still only 6% of the size of total plastics production.

More needs to be done to create a separate and well-functioning market for recycled plastics, which are still viewed as substitutes for virgin plastic. Setting recycled content targets and investing in improved recycling technologies could help to make secondary markets more competitive and profitable.

However, it is not encouraging when we observe that only an extremely low percentage of plastics get recycled. A sustainable solution for managing the unattended plastic wastes, which is over 90% of what's consumed is much awaited.

Challanges exist in Collection of these wastes spread all over our earth and its water bodies. And then either creating an end to the life of this waste e.g. by incernating in a cement factory kiln alternatively create solutions out of storage especially out of the multi-layer plastics popularly and effectively used to package food products. An organization in Bangalore has successfully demonstrated such solutions in its pilot projects.

However, for a global scale adoption of such innovative systems, the 8 billion people need to participate unitedly along with their governments. The potential damage that this "wonder product" can do to our ecosystem and the blue planet where we live is irreversibly fatal.