All plastic is potently a problem if it ends up in the wrong place . But the biggest problem is micro plastic . It comes out of washing machine , from the our clothes . Micro beads are still being used in many parts of the world . Big bits of plastic will brake dowen into micro plastic . Micro plastic is found in all the seas everywhere . It is being ingested by the wildlife and the consequences is not full understood. Plastic is not a problem , the problem is letting it get out in the environment. I understand the original question and the fact is there are some replacements for some tings , but there is no realistic alternative to plastic . Better waste management will be the priority. But in the mean time I would suggest you stop eating fish.
WI:no plastics
- Thread starter Brita
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"Try to imagine a world without plastic. At first it seems easy. Lots of things could be made of other materials. Eyeglasses, for example, could be made of glass and metal just as they were for centuries. Computer cases could be made of sheet metal. Kitchen counters could be surfaced in ceramic tile, and linoleum would do just fine for floors. Automobiles would become heaver and consume more fuel, but we could live with that. Glass milk bottles would enable us to avoid paper cartons with their irritating flakes of wax. Frisbees would not exist. nor would compact discs. The list could go on and on. Without belaboring the obvious, few of the objects we use daily would remain unchanged. Some would be impossible. We would inhabit a different world, parallel perhaps. but certainly not the same place. Commenting on plastic from the opposite perspective, novelist Mark Helprin imagined an inhabitant of the 1890's magically transported a hundred years into the future. As he awakens, unaware of what had happened to him, and becomes more alert (and more disoriented). he notices that "the things were shaped, and the materials of which they were made, seemed almost otherworldly . . . everything seemed to have grown smooth, to have lost its texture." We are told that "never before had he seen plastic."'
"It is hard to do justice to plastic because it serves so many functions, assumes so many guises. satisfies so many desires, and so quickly recedes into relative invisibility as long as it does its job well..." Jeffrey L. Meikle, American Plastic: A Cultural History (Rutgers University Press 1995) https://books.google.com/books?id=u_1ePU4GEGAC&pg=PA1936
And as the same book notes, we wouldn't have the famous line from The Graduate:
"It is hard to do justice to plastic because it serves so many functions, assumes so many guises. satisfies so many desires, and so quickly recedes into relative invisibility as long as it does its job well..." Jeffrey L. Meikle, American Plastic: A Cultural History (Rutgers University Press 1995) https://books.google.com/books?id=u_1ePU4GEGAC&pg=PA1936
And as the same book notes, we wouldn't have the famous line from The Graduate: