I want to say one word to you. Just one word

You guessed that word: Plastics.

Fifty years after that famous scene, plastics are now only a tad more popular than trump!

What happened?

First, just because of the backlash against plastics, do not assume that they are unimportant.

You might be surprised to learn, for instance, that today’s cars and planes are, by volume, about 50% plastic. More clothing is made out of polyester and nylon, both plastics, than cotton or wool. Plastic is also used in minute quantities as an adhesive to seal the vast majority of the 60bn teabags used in Britain each year.
Add this to the more obvious expanse of toys, household bric-a-brac and consumer packaging, and the extent of plastic’s empire becomes clear. It is the colourful yet banal background material of modern life. Each year, the world produces around 340m tonnes of the stuff, enough to fill every skyscraper in New York City. Humankind has produced unfathomable quantities of plastic for decades, first passing the 100m tonne mark in the early 1990s. But for some reason it is only very recently that people have really begun to care.

What a revolution it was!  Once gadgets started appearing at home, plastic was everywhere.  In the "mixie" and the "grinder."  Women felt some relief, if not liberated, from their kitchen chores. Television. Phone.  Fridge. ...

Despite all that the plastics have done for us, we now hate plastic!

The United Nations has declared a “war” on single-use plastic. In Britain, Theresa May has called it a “scourge”, and committed the government to a 25-year plan that would phase out disposable packaging by 2042. India claimed it would do the same, but by 2022.

Yep, it is now a war on plastic!

An uncomfortable truth in this war?

To take on plastic is in some way to take on consumerism itself. It requires us to recognise just how radically our way of life has reshaped the planet in the span of a single lifetime, and ask whether it is too much.

Our consumer culture has been made possible by plastic.  Plastic is not the problem, but is a symptom.  Our consumerism is the real problem.

Is plastic the biggest issue?  Nope. I would claim that climate change is a way bigger threat.  So, why so much of attention on plastics?

unlike climate change, which seems vague, vast, and apocalyptic, plastic is smaller, more tangible, it is in your life right now. “The public doesn’t make these fine calculations – this is X times worse than that,” says Tom Burke, a former director of Friends of the Earth. “A moment crystallises and people see that other people feel the same way they do about an issue, then you get a push. People just want things fixed.” Or, as Christian Dunn, a fast-talking ecology lecturer from the University of Bangor, who has spent the past year helping to turn his hometown of Chester into one of Britain’s most anti-plastic cities, put it: “It’s something we can just get on with.”

The manner in which we people establish priorities is strange!

But, there is some good coming out of this war on plastic:

Our obsession with plastic has registered. In the much larger battle over climate change, the plastic backlash could end up being a small but energising victory, a model for future action.
This means facing up to how interconnected the problems are: to recognise that plastic isn’t just an isolated problem that we can banish from our lives, but simply the most visible product of our past half-century of rampant consumption. Despite the immensity of the challenge, when I spoke to Richard Thompson, the oceanographer who coined the term microplastic, he was upbeat. “At no time in the past 30 years have we had a convergence like this, with scientists, business, and government,” he said. “There’s a real chance to get this thing right.”

At least we can feel good about ourselves for launching this war.