The plastic we throw away in a single year could circle the earth four times. Out of the 320 million metric tonnes of new plastic mass-produced each year 1 – almost all from oil – eight million tonnes leak into the world’s oceans and waterways. That is the equivalent of a truckload of plastic being upturned and shaken out straight into the sea every minute of every day. Every minute of every day, one million plastic bottles are used.2 Imagine each of those bottles, a quarter filled with oil; the amount of oil needed to make the bottle in the first place.3 In the last decade we’ve produced more plastic than we did during the whole of the last century. And – this is the one that usually stops people in their tracks – by 2050 the ocean will contain more plastic by weight than fish.4
Plastic has us in a vice-like grip. It has colonised supermarket shelves and kitchen bins; invaded parks, grass verges, beaches and beauty spots. It has leaked into our oceans to impact wildlife and muscled its way on to the nightly news. For a material that’s supposed to provide background assistance to everyday life, that’s quite the attention upgrade.
Plastic has jostled its way into our very souls, but more alarmingly still, it has been shown to be in both our food chain and our bodies. Cleaning up the unwanted plastic from all of these areas and halting its further march into the fabric of our lives starts right now. It has to. In human history, as many have observed, there was the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age and today we are living through the Plastic Age. But the Plastic Age is not something we can sit by and watch passively, observing as if the inexorable plastic takeover was just another natural phase of human evolution. As I’ll show in this book, the impact of the plastic pandemic is so serious, it becomes a zero-sum game. Either plastic wins or we do.
ONE BILLION ELEPHANTS . . .
The last twelve months have unleashed not just another 320 million tonnes of virgin plastic – that’s brand-new plastic from newly extracted oil – but an abundance of analysis as to what that may or may not mean for our planet. Perhaps out of all the figures that have been posited, the report that really rocked me was by the well-respected industrial ecologist and academic Professor Roland Geyer, heading up a team of US researchers. This was the first global analysis of all the plastic production there has ever been5 and it blew my socks off.
Professor Geyer’s report shows that in total humans have produced 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic since its industrial-scale production really got going in the 1950s. That’s the weight of one billion elephants. By 2015 just 9 per cent had been recycled, 12 per cent incinerated and 79 per cent had accumulated in landfills or the wider environment. That means nearly all the plastic that has ever been produced is still with us.
The ecological impact of our plastic production is plain to see. From the Great Barrier Reef, which now requires a $500 million ‘rescue’ package from the Australian government, to the fast-melting glaciers in Alaska, the planet is sending us clear and insistent distress signals: that we must take urgent action to halt global warming and habitat destruction. All the while, however, we persist in creating yet more – more new plastic, and more plastic waste. Ignoring all of the evidence and these alarms from the natural world, plastic production and consumption continues to rise at a relentless pace.
This is not a war on all plastics. As pointed out in ‘The New Plastics Economy’, a seminal report from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, plastics now make up 15 per cent of the average car (making them lighter and more fuel- or electricity-efficient), and approximately 50 per cent of the Boeing Dreamliner. The report notes that ‘imagining a world without plastics is nearly impossible’.6 Given that the aim of the report was to evaluate the potential for an alternative to an increasingly, even entirely plastic planet, this speaks volumes – if the leading minds in innovation can’t imagine life without plastics, then that means it’s pretty tough to imagine them gone completely.
In any case, this might be neither desirable nor realistic. Some polymers perform critical, life-saving functions, quite literally: plastic forms heart valves and is used in bulletproof vests. Its low weight and incredible heat resistance means it is necessary for space shuttles. From ice rinks to sports pitches and children’s playgrounds and Lego, it enables our leisure lives, too. Of course there are polymers with noble ends and heroic applications. That’s irrefutable.
What this is, is a battle against avoidable, unwanted, useless, nuisance plastic that is unnecessarily forced upon us and then into the natural environment, where its impact is devastating.
Not a day goes by when I don’t hear of a miracle cure for the plastic plague. Don’t worry, I’m told, our heaps of discarded plastic will soon be eaten by enzymes deployed outside the local supermarket or blasted off, moon-bound, in a rocket. Respectfully, I disagree with these predictions. There are some exciting breakthroughs, but they are at a very early stage. There is no silver bullet. The plastic problem is a lot more complex than the optimists would like us to think.
The stakes are high and the solutions far from simple. Our politicians (of all persuasions) have a shaky relationship with the planet. There is often little appetite at government level for the radical action that’s needed to stop an environmental disaster. Obfuscation and confusion rule, as blame and responsibility are shifted between states and governments. The democratic political cycle lasts on average four years, rather than geological epochs that last tens of thousands, so you can see why the political system is not exactly set up to take a long-term sustainable view. Many environmental issues remain an inconvenient truth. It would be more expedient to carry on as usual.
As Professor Geyer put it himself, ‘We cannot continue with business as usual unless we want a planet that is literally covered in plastic.’7 Who on earth would want that?
TURNING THE TIDE ON PLASTIC
Huge numbers of us are now waking up to the plastic pandemic and deciding that if governments and global agencies won’t or can’t move fast enough, then we are going to have to do something ourselves. But how? What is the most effective form of action we can take?
Turning the Tide on Plastic is, in essence, a survival guide. I’m quite the fan of this genre. I’m always giving out survival guides as Christmas presents, and I avidly watch shows like The Island on Channel 4. This means my brother-in-law knows what to do in the event of meeting a grizzly bear and I know, theoretically, how to kill a caiman for food (I wouldn’t. I’m vegetarian). Never mind that we will most likely never face either scenario. Thanks to the popularity of adventurists such as Bear Grylls, millions of people are equipped with an arsenal of handy survival skills – at least in their heads. But isn’t it curious that we’re so prepared for life on Bear’s island, and so ill-prepared for emergencies on our own? Sometimes fighting a threat is particularly difficult simply because it’s under your nose and in your own home, and so becomes oddly familiar.
That’s where this book comes in. In Turning the Tide on Plastic, I want to unwrap everything about plastic – from its creation to its likely destination – to equip you with the latest information in order to make up your own mind about the use and misuse of plastic, and give you practical tips and strategies to help you make choices or changes today to help our planet of tomorrow.
Plastic has become an unavoidable fact of modern life. As with anything habitual and longstanding, we need first to understand the root cause of our dependency. We need to get to grips with what plastic is and why it’s everywhere. This book distils the latest research, along with what I’ve learned about the plastic crisis over a career in writing, researching and broadcasting on the environment. I’ve interviewed industry leaders and environmental campaigners, talked to people like you and me who want to play their part and reduce their plastic consumption. Not only is this strangely fascinating (I warn you, it doesn’t take much to become a polymer nerd, holding containers up to the light in order to try and determine their chemical content), but it is crucial in order to see the full picture and understand what is truly at stake. By exploring and increasing our understanding of the backstory of our plastic dilemma, we will become more resilient, resourceful and, I hope, more resistant to the avoidable plastic that blights our lives.
I take a look behind the curtain to explain what is really going on in our recycling system, and how and why the plastic that we generate is ending up as a pollutant. I uncover the way plastic is pushed upon us by retailers and manufacturers – behind everything we buy is a complex supply chain, and while we don’t need to be expert on the entire length of that chain, as consumers we need to recognise the pinch points, where and why plastic is being added to the equation – and how we can take action to put a brake on it.
Part 2, New Tools, New Rules, is geared to helping you reduce your plastic footprint. I describe some of my wins, and outline down-to-earth ideas and strategies to devise your own Plastic Survival Plan. Here you will find a wealth of sound, simple tips and practical how-tos that you can put to work to make a change. Right now.
My plan is to get right between you and your plastic dependency and consciously uncouple your life from the material. In effect this is an enforced break-up, an intervention. We are so dependent on plastics in our lives, and we use so many habitually, it’s incredibly rewarding to see how making small changes can yield big results. Every step is geared towards making sure we turn that tide.
The small steps I outline here might feel like a drop in the ocean but together, I believe, we can and will effect a change. It feels good to know you have an army behind you, doesn’t it?