Pressing need for tackling a global plastics crisis

British medical journal The Lancet has warned that there is a need to check the rampant use of plastics and that it is causing harm, including death, to human beings, to animals, in rivers and seas. The journal said, “Plastics are a grave, growing, under-recognised danger to human and planetary health. Plastics cause disease and death from infancy to old age.”

It also said that the use of plastics is contributing to climate change, pollution and loss of biodiversity. It is reckoned that 8,000 mega tonnes pollute the planet as of now. Plastic production is set to triple by 2060, and only less than 10 per cent of it is recycled.

The plastics problem is costing world governments $1.5 trillion annually in health costs. The piece carrying the warnings against plastic is part of the campaign that the journal has launched, called, “The Lancet Countdown on health and plastics.” It coincides with the start of a 175-nation global conference on plastics in Switzerland.

The aim of the conference is to forge a Global Plastics Treaty. It is not going to be easy because countries like China, Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia are opposing a ban on plastics, and prefer plastic recycling.

Plastic recycling is not a helpful solution with the existing technology because the proportion of recycling is very low, 10 per cent. So, 90 per cent un-recycled plastic hangs ominously over the whole globe, causing immense harm to the health of the population and the ecosystem.

The Lancet has expressed the view that the harm cause by plastics is underestimated, and therefore the real extent of harm done by it remains an underestimation. The journal notes, “Given the considerable gaps of knowledge of plastic chemicals, it is reasonable to conclude that the full extent of these chemicals’ harm to health is underestimated and that the burden of disease currently attributed to them is undercounted.”

The use of plastic is ubiquitous, and its use across sectors has grown in humongous proportions since the 1950s, from furniture to electronics and electric appliances to furniture at home and in offices, in the packaging industry and medical appliances.

So, an effective alternative in place of plastics has to be found if the use of harmful plastics is to be controlled and reduced. The journal argues that the petro-chemical industry is churning out plastic even as the use of fossil fuels is going down.

This appears to be quite speculative in the absence of hard data. It would of course be unfair to dismiss the hypothesis out of hand. The journal is also not on firm ground in the solution it offers. It says, “It is now clear that the world cannot recycle its way out of the plastic pollution crisis. Control of the plastics crisis will require continuing research coupled with the science-driven interventions – laws, policies, monitoring, enforcement, incentives, and innovation.”

There is implied that scientific knowledge as it exists now does not offer any ready-made solutions to the plastic crisis. So, government policies banning the use of plastic will of be of little use. It also shows that not all technological breakthroughs are benign.

The discovery of plastic and its innumerable uses has now turned out to be a big source of pollution, and a clear danger to the health of people. The topics for research on plastics have to focus on recycling, or find another set of chemicals which can be as protean as the use of chemicals that have given rise to plastics.

It is said that 16,000 chemicals are used in the making of plastics. With the evolving AI helping chemical research in developing newer molecules and produce new kind of chemicals than the chemicals that produce plastics.