Addicted to Plastic

I recently watched this documentary and despite what the title makes you think, it isn’t about nosejobs or facelifts.  It’s about the mass amount of plastic that our society manufactures and quickly disposes of and how it is negatively affecting the way we live and the planet we live on.

Of course, it doesn’t just take an entirely negative stance on the subject.  It recognizes that plastic is perhaps one of the greatest inventions ever made by mankind.  It is lightweight, easily and cheaply produced, strong and can be made into basically any shape or form…limited only by our own power of invention.  However, once it is made, it is not easy to get rid of it as plastic does not degrade in the same way that most natural materials do.

That isn’t a big deal, you say?  We can always recycle plastics?  This is true…plastics can be recycled but the film also shows how incredibly difficult it is to do so.  Most products contain several different types of plastics which cannot be mixed when recycled and sorting at the recycling depot can only go so far.  The fact of the matter is the majority of plastics produced eventually end up in a landfill somewhere, remaining there for what we can only assume will be the next thousand years.

It isn’t just the plastic that ends up on land that is a problem.  The film takes us out to sea to observe the amount of plastic just floating on the surface of the water, in particular on top of the areas where the currents in the ocean meet.  Of course, most of it isn’t visible like a massive maelstrom of plastic bottles gathered at the center of the ocean like I had imagined in my head but after trolling a sieve through the water for awhile, it is easy to see how much errant plastic ends up in the ocean. Some of it is mistaken for food by fish.  Those fish are eaten by birds or bigger fish and it just goes on.  Plastics have contaminated just about everything.

What can we do about this?  Well, it would be rather difficult to be without such a versatile material that we have come to rely on so much in almost every aspect of daily life but it is quite obvious that we need to find solutions both in manufacturing of new products as well as disposing of the stuff we already have.