It was with great pleasure I stumbled upon plastics engineer Miranda Marcus' blog in the UK Huffington Post this month titled 'Plastics aren't wrecking the environment - People are'.
The matter-of-fact reality check piece made some beautifully scientific counter arguments to the uninformed jabbing statements the mainstream media continues to make about plastics, with many outlets promoting Plastic Free July to their readers - which to any European should be, frankly, an absurd notion, and no amount of home-made yoghurt will convince me otherwise.
I am sure I am not alone in this but I regularly find myself wading into arguments I was never invited to join in the first place to state the case for plastics. Here are a few examples of the debates I feel compelled to throw my two cents into.
Hemp
Why can't we make all our plastics out of hemp?
I come across this argument a lot - although you can substitute 'hemp' for a startlingly broad church of nouns (banana skins, grass clippings, avocado shells). 'Why can't we make all our plastics out of hemp?' cry the social media posts, showcasing packaging and clothing made using the wonder plant that will cleanse our world of dirty petroleum-based products.
Why can't we make all plastic products out of hemp? Because you could kiss goodbye to great swathes of the planet's biodiversity in order to farm enough to process it into a biofeedstock for plastics. Because the end product will not have the barrier properties or the correct flexibility and tensile strength for every packaging, electrical and automotive application - though it may for some. Because the plastics already used to package everything from paracetamol to life-saving blood for transfusions have been tested to the high standards medical grade polymers have to meet in order to be marketable. To test a bioplastic made of hemp feedstock for every single application would be incredibly expensive and in many cases entirely pointless.
Why can't all plastics be biodegradable?
I meet the same blinking obstinacy when I challenge those who seem hell bent on convincing me that all plastic products can be biodegradable, so why are evil brands not making their bottles and wrappers biodegradable?
Their intentions are always good, but we should be encouraging people to sort their used plastics responsibly and treat all polymers as a resource just like copper or glass, rather than sending it all to landfill where it'll apparently completely vanish and cease to be a problem. Out of sight, out of mind is a lazy and costly attitude to take. Every government in Europe is working to educate people to responsibly sort their waste, and schemes are being set up all the time to ensure no plastics are wasted post-consumption. Are we going to let millions of tonnes of plastics just melt into the landscape and lose all their valuable chemistry? The argument makes about as much financial sense as blasting all our difficult-to-recycle waste into space.
We used to live perfectly well without plastics
I gesture wildly around me with exasperation when anybody suggests that we go back to the good old days where we didn't have plastics at all. Yes, back to the days of lead sewerage systems, brass autos, knitted swimwear (my father often tells me about the woolly trunks of his 1950s childhood), no mobile phones and draughty wooden windowpanes.
What would a supermarket look like without plastics? There'd certainly be a lot less in it. The tinned food market would skyrocket because we wouldn't be able to store fresh food for as long without plastic packaging.
And what would your wardrobe look like? Your trainers would look very different and you’d feel the effects of that 10-mile run in your feet long before the rest of you began to ache. You could kiss goodbye to your ultra-light compression shirts and stretchy spinning leggings. Your fake leather jacket would vanish.
I understand I am preaching to the converted today, but I agree with Marcus 100 per cent when she says that thanks to polymer technology, our lives are more comfortable, longer and more connected.
"I am tired to death of people wanting to 'ban plastics' when really they just want to find a more environmentally responsible way of packaging and carrying goods, or alternatively, to encourage recycling of all materials (cardboard and metals clog landfills too)," she stated. "If you want to ban plastics it’s just a sign that you have no idea what they’re used for."
Hear hear!
