MIEJ Iftu - Plastic

The Dominion of Plastic :

Rise , Peak and Contemplating the Future

*This article has been written for Green Lead

Do you remember the Malaysian missing flight MH-370, a 2014 sensation? It was never actually found. What did we find then ?

Well, most certainly, I am not here to write a bone-chilling thriller air crash investigation for you. Just to let you know, satellites were deployed on the Indian Ocean in search of the aeroplane. But it was more like looking for a needle in a haystack. What is the haystack about ? No, it was not the planktons or seaweed, it was plastic - all of it.

The history of artificial plastics dates long back to 1830 with the discovery that cellulose can be nitrated and explosives can be made of it. Gun Cotton - a nitrocellulose based flammable object came into light , but it was not welcomed very well since some of the factories were blown up while producing them. Then came the genius of Alexander Parkes who added some substances with Gun Cotton making it usable for regular goods in 1856 and patented the material as “Parkesine” in 1857, the first man-made plastic. Few years later in 1862 he made an exhibition of aesthetic and utility products like button, knife holder , razors - all of which were made of plastic. From 1866 to 1868 , he tried to commercialize Parkesine which did not happen due to high flammability and being prone to cracks. [1]

The story could have ended right there. But destiny had different ideas in mind.

Billiard - a game of the then aristocrats required huge amounts of ivory to make billiard balls. And in 1867, people started suspecting the extinction of elephants due to that.

Michael Phelan , a billiard star in the US, announced 10K USD for the substitute of Ivory in making billiard balls. John Wesley Hyatt, an American scientist who worked on Parkesine , improved it with a more stable and usable product and patented it as Celluloid in 1869. In just one year, he came up with billiard balls, false teeth, and piano keys made of plastics. [2]

Even the efforts of Hyatt did not propel the growth of plastic that much. It was Mr. Leo Baekeland who invented Bakelite from synthetic components which are superior to the Celluloid due to its electrical insulation and heat resistivity once it had been molded. [3]

The plastics industry took off right from there. Polyester in 1930, Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and Polythene in 1933 and Nylon in 1935 - started drawing attention.[4] With the emergence of the Injection Moulding technique factories were generating 1000 combs each day that could produce only 350 combs a day earlier. [5]

Then, the 2nd World War had started and where plastics were introduced on a massive scale starting from helmets to water-resistant coats or cockpits made of plexiglass. WWII truly escalated the plastics industry. After WWII ended in 1945, the investors and manufacturers needed a market to push their products. Where did they do it ? They did it to the mainstream .

1950 marks as one of the most significant years or starting of a decade that reshaped the entire civilization. Since 1950, we have a whopping 9.2 billion tons of plastics material to cope with. Well over 6.9 billion tons of which have been dumped. And 6.3 billion tons of the waste never made it to a recycling bin, a statistic that astounded scientists who studied these figures in 2017. [6]

Let’s get back to the journey. It is in the decade of 1970 where people started to realize the problem behind plastics.

In 1974, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration restricted the workers’ exposure to vinyl chloride when 26 laborers died from angiosarcoma, which is very rare liver cancer and was presumably related to the plastics directly.[5]

In 1975 Coca Cola bottles were being questioned which were made of Acrylonitrile materials [7]. Usage of this compound was banned in 1977 when some tests suggested its toxicity [8]. By 1979 we were producing more plastic than steel [9].

And that is the statistic which sums up the scenario. For the last 40 years, the plastic industry has just kept on growing. This plastic material BPA (bisphenol A) interferes with hormones and are carcinogenic and it is entering our body via trophic level accumulation. Plastics have been hurting us badly, harming the environment.

So what is happening now ? In 2018 , a sperm whale had 29 kilos of garbage plastic in its stomach [10]. A 31 feet long dead sperm whale was found in Indonesia with 6kg plastic garbage in its stomach including 4 water bottles,115 drinking cups, 2 flip flops and 25 plastic bags. [11]

Now, what lies in the future ? Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and try to Refuse these materials ?

Apparently, we cannot opt-out of plastics immediately considering its mass usage and the kind of comfort it provides at a cheap price. But the movement has already started with banning plastic-based materials in some parts of the planet. Even there is some factual evidence to advocate plastics.

Switching to paper or cloth bags may reduce pollution, but they take more energy to be manufactured, which means they add more to global warming unless they are reused 3 or 131 times, respectively [12]. Plastic grocery-bag bans in the United States from 2007 to 2016 prevailed but it hardly came up with satisfactory results since consumers were found purchasing more plastic bags for garbage disposal in place of the shopping bags they used. [13]. In the Northern Ireland Assembly, it was reported that it takes more than four times of energy to produce a paper bag compared to its plastic version.

So what we get out of this discussion is quite simple. The production of plastics needs to be restricted and reuse of these materials should be the first priority. Started with saving elephants, plastic is now eating up the entire civilization. The invention that had driven us to the future needs to be relegated to the past now.

References :

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This article is revised by Nazmul Reza Rahat

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