Why we should use more plastic
Recently, plastic gets a lot of hate and this hatered is undeserved. It has it’s curses and it’s blessings, but material by itself is pretty amazing and it has improved so many areas of our lives. Take medicine, for example. Syringes, blood bags, catheter tubes. This material is literally a life saver.
So why then every self respecting business and person feels obliged to declare a war against plastic? Here, probably, pictures of dying turtles and fish choking on the straws come to your mind. Rightly so. Once it is a freely wandering waste it is a pest and a catastrophe.
However, material is not at fault. Material by itself is awesome. It is how we use it that is a problem. We took a brilliant thing and made it a mass-murderer. Suddenly, we started to wrap every 33 cl of water into plastic and sip it through a plastic straw, to later put it in a plastic bag and a bit later to through all together away or, God forbid, just let it fly from the window of a driving car.
The truth is, it is not a material, it is how we use it. Take any material, no matter how ‘environmentally friendly’ it is, if we use it with a ‘make-use-through away’ attitude it will also lead to a disaster.
That brings me to the paper. With an increasing hate towards plastic, more and more businesses rely on fish and turtle friendly biodegradable paper. But guess what? If we want to swap all the single-use plastic with single-use paper, we will have to keep on cutting trees — one of the major helpers in capturing CO2. In fact, the study done in Denmark (1.) tells us that plastic bag is the most environmentally friendly when it comes to production phase, while organic cotton bag is actually the worst bag one can rely on in the matters of saving the planet. It has to be reused 20 000 times more than plastic one to cancel the impact out. Yet, in my local supermarket, those are increasingly popular as a go-to for vegetables and fruits. We can’t keep on tapping on Earth resources for something as inessential as packaging .
So why don’t we re-use what is already there, laying on the landfill? One of such materials is textile — a sad fast-fashion victim. With an average clothing item living only 2.2 years (2.), there are heaps and mountains of it passing by charities and eventually ending up on the landfills. Why not to reuse it as a produce bags and stop making new ones? That would clean the landfills, save virgin material, save water and can be brilliant solution for packaging of so many things. We have great variability of materials there that can suit so many purposes! How about grapes in a sturdy jeans container? Potatoes in a exquisite lace bag? I would love to see that. Moreover, it can create a bunch of extra workspaces and is not difficult to execute on the local level.
So let’s stop blindly hating plastic, let’s aknowledge the real root of the problem, let’s bring single-use down to where it is absolutely necessary and let’s lace potatoes up. Who is in?
References:
1. https://www2.mst.dk/Udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-73-4.pdf
