THE "EVIL" OF PLASTICS AND THE LIE ABOUT ITS RECYCLING: CLIMATE CHANGE FACETS (PART 2):

The plastic industry in collusion with the fossil fuel industry has been lying to the overall global public for decades...

Please read Part 1 of my article at:?https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/climate-change-facets-evil-side-plastics-luiz-antonio-gomes-msc-mba-dm4vf/

Since the first type of plastic was developed a few decades ago, it has been an absolute success in terms of production, utility, application and diversification but from the environmental point of view, humans included, it has been a disaster and unsolvable plague??

Besides the thrown-away beverage bottles, chemical vials, various packages, wrapping films, tools, equipment, housing stuff and toys that are voluntarily dumped in huge landfills or incinerated (compacted and thrown in the landfills) there is the formation of unimaginable volumes of microplastics, which are fragments of most types of plastics (e.g., plastic bags) of less than 5 mm (0.2 in) in length?

The volume is so immense that only in a part of the mid-Pacific, the ocean current formed a huge island that is 3 times the size of France composed of floating?microplastics and equivalent which has even been named the 7th (or 8th) continent?or the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/great-pacific-garbage-patch/) composed of over 80,000 tonnes of??plastic waste?stuff that is

Nowadays there is plastic waste and "penetration" (microplastics) thoroughly in every single place like in all foods, air, water, topsoil, blood, mother's breast milk, testicles, brain, liver, lungs, all animals, agricultural lands, etc

Currently plastic production, only for plastic beverage bottles is about 1 million bottles/ minute or 1,3 Billion per day and it is predicted that it will more than triple in the next 2,5 decades.?

?As for the numbers, about 70% of plastics are carelessly dumped in landfills all over the world. Some countries even export compressed waste in commercial ship containers?to other countries?with looser regulations that need money, but it will all pollute the same global environment; it is like sweeping trash under the carpet.? ?

??Then about 20% is incinerated and also ends up in landfills (at smaller volumes) or sunk in the ocean and only about 10% is recycled (only 4% in the U.S., which sometimes exports the compressed trash)

The world produces approximately 400 million tons of plastic waste per year or 20,000 truckloads of plastic is dumped into landfills, oceans etc?

?Of all the plastic that is produced in the world, 90% can NOT be recycled! This is because different types of plastics can not be mixed and recycled together.

There are 7 basic types of plastics, which you see the numbers 1 to 7 inside those 3 "Chasing Arrow Triangles" (e.g., PET= #1, DHPE= #2 etc).

? But these receive additives to modify or mold their properties so in fact there are thousands of types of plastics that can not be joined together, mixed and recycled.??

? So we are stuck with this evergrowing unsolvable hazardous threat and many climate experts focus mainly on controlling CO2 emissions to save the?destruction of our civilization via the growing #climatecrisis. But the compounding of all the kinds of pollution, disequilibrium and destruction?of the natural?environment?made by humanity counts and adds up to the #weather events we are suffering today.?

?Besides the technical problems with recycling plastics, there is the cost factor. It is much cheaper to produce fresh new plastic stuff from cheap and simply acquired and manipulated? byproducts?of the Oil and Gas industry, which receives a subsidy of some $1 Trillion per year

Add to this the logistics and coordination of picking up the plastic waste from uncountable regions combined into various locations, hand-picked and meticulously separated by various classes and then going over the trouble of recycling. It is just not viable!

? And all this trouble only to be able to recycle plastics #1 and #2 (of the exact same chemical constitution, color etc), the 5 are not recyclable.

? And worse, these 2 types can be recycled only once or twice after which it turns to be waste.?

?Over 16,000 chemicals are used to make the variety of plastics we use.?therefore, to make things further worse, or what has been called a global crisis, are the multiple types of diseases it causes, including cancer to say the least. According to the "Global Plastics Treaty" organization, of the few 5 groups of chemicals studied by scientists so far (they don't have available funds for research differently from the multi-trillion plastic and oil & gas industries) all had alarming impacts.?

?Here is the root of the problem, the plastic industry which is married to the fossil fuel industry knew all these and other?problems, the?unavailability?of recycling, the Mammut global landfills, the microplastic-everywhere-pollution for decades and criminally lied to us with various marketing strategies like the circular economy and recycling.?

? Then one might think why did I go through the trouble of separating all the plastic from my trash? To go to a neighbor's landfield??

?Recommendations:

1) watch the video link of this article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXVjZjAple8&t=615s?

2) read my article part 1,

3) visit the site Global Plastics Treaty organization to understand how serious this crisis is and what can be done to help:?https://www.globalplastictreaty.com/human-health?

4) please give a like?to the article and share