Plastic, Plastic everywhere

"By inventing the locomotive, you also invent derailments."

(Authors note and forewarning – The intention of this rant is not to point fingers or try to somehow manipulate guilt. I’m not exactly the hippy tree hugging "save the planet" kind of guy…This is meant to inform, and only so. Be informed, be aware, know!)

In 1909, Leo Baekeland patended a synthetic polymer he called Bakelite, a mouldable hard plastic – the very first of it’s kind –
He was aiming to mimic "shellac", a secretion from an asain beetle used to coat electrical wires.
Suffice to say – He was made an extremely wealthy man

The human infection grew, and chemists experimented with the polymer, adding chlorine for PVC and gas for polystyrene
1935 – The world gets a taste of nylon (introduced first as women’s stockings)
Following the second world war came acrylics, foam rubber, polythene, polyurethane, and plexi-glass, all of which remain in use today.

Not one person – Not one person stopped for one second to think ‘hum, I wonder what kind of environmental implications this could have years down the road?’ ….but then, had anyone in the past thought that very thought, we might not have the things we have now.

Fast forward to today – Plastic is unavoidably everywhere. Bottles, jugs, windows, chairs, cups, phones, cars….right down to the plastic in your shoes. It’s in the devices we use everyday and everywhere in between. Even third world countries are overrun with the miracle polymer.

The problem (and you knew this was coming) is that plastic doesn’t biodegrade. I know you’ve heard from one source or another that a plastic bottle will take 1,000 years to biodegrade in a landfill – wrong. Simply put, it’s photodegradable, meaning those plastic polymers break down into smaller particles, and so on and so forth. Thus, tossing your plastic bottles or whathaveyou away means it will just sit there, in the ground, and break down into tiny little plastic pellets. Forever.

So everything runs downhill….and eventually, ends up in the ocean.
Believe me, it gets worse. The plastics that we’ve tossed aside now ends up in the ocean, and floats away peacefully, bobbing around for endless years. It photodegrades into tiny plastic pellets, and though some of it washes ashore on thousands of beaches worldwide (pick a beach, any beach. Dip your hand into the sand at the waterline. You’ll find not sand, but degraded plastic pellets. Yes kids, it’s been proven. Don’t believe me? Go to the beach!)

The stuff that doesn’t wash ashore floats calmly around the world 24/7/365. In specific gyre areas, far more dense than others. A rating of 6:1in plankton (that’s 6 plastic pellets for every 1 plankton) killing all sorts of fishies and birdies and other stupid wildlife mistaking plastic for food. Not that I’ve ever had a specific taste for fish or any liking for albatross birds, but damn, that sucks for them.

So think cambells chunky soup. Replace those chunkies with plastic, replace the soup with the ocean, and there you have it.

The best part about it all, the real fucked up icing on the cake: If we stopped producing plastic completely right now, at this very moment, it would take 4,000 years for the earth to recover…And there’d still be a plastic crisis.

Random fact: Nothing on earth has the ability to digest or degrade plastic completely. It’s permanent, as in FOREVER.

In closing, it’s probably a good time to start looking into a) biodegradable plastics (they do exist!) and b) a new planet because this one is fucked.

The end.