Robin Hanbury-Tenison on solving the plastics problem across the globe before we all end up as waste products
By Robin Hanbury Tenison
Do you remember the scene in the 1967 film, The Graduate, when a young Dustin Hoffman is told by Mr McGuire, ‘I want to say one word to you, just one word — plastics — there’s a great future in plastics’? Well, there certainly was, so much so that they’ve become one of the greatest threats facing us today.
Our use of plastics has increased exponentially since then, and today, millions of tonnes are released into our waterways annually. Throughout the whole world, even in the remotest deserts, rain forests, ice caps and oceans, plastic waste is found, and virtually every creature on Earth now has traces of microplastics in their system. This makes the problem far worse than the well-publicised pictures of turtles and fish caught up in abandoned fishing nets and the poisoning effects of plastics being ingested by birds and other animals; it means that plastic waste created by us is in danger of extinguishing much of life on Earth.
There are massive floating garbage patches of slowly degrading plastic in each of the world’s oceans. These are caused by gyres, the centres of rotating masses of water driven by the spinning of the Earth. The largest is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, located between Hawaii and California, and estimated to be three times the size of France. This patch alone has been calculated to have about two trillion plastic pieces floating in it — that’s about 250 pieces of debris for every human in the world. And that’s just one of the five plastic accumulation zones in the world’s oceans.
Plastics are made from oil, which comes from dead trees and other plants long buried underground, where they’ve become hydrocarbons in the form of coal, natural gas and oil. They might, therefore, be expected to decompose as quickly as any other plants. The trouble is that they don’t, and this is because, having been buried out of sight for so long, few life forms have evolved to eat them. This is one of the reasons they’ve proved so extraordinarily useful to us, but also so devastating for nature. Fortunately evolution, which really just means nature’s way of solving problems, has come up with a few bacteria that can break down plastic with enzymes. Exciting research is in hand to come up with commercially viable processes that will make plastic recycling possible to do at scale. Imagine ships the size of aircraft carriers sucking up the ocean garbage patches and converting it all into lightweight building blocks. These could replace much of the cement industry, which is alone responsible for eight per cent of carbon dioxide emissions, far more than those caused by aviation. And, of course, the same could be done on land, avoiding the need for endless landfill sites.
It’s hard to imagine that minuscule things like microbes really could solve a problem like plastic disposal, but they already do play a large but largely unseen role in our lives. From wine and cheese making to beer and salami, they’re quietly transforming what we eat and drink, and without them, the world would be sky-high with corpses because they’re at the heart of all decomposition.
Today, they’re already being used in many innovative ways to make our lives better through the imaginative use of food waste, for example. One-third of all the food produced in the world goes to waste. A Taiwanese company called Singtex is making fabric from old coffee grounds; QMilk is making biodegradable textile fibre from some of the eight million litres of milk that go to waste in Germany each year; Vegea in Milan makes a plant-based leather-like product made from wine waste and, also in Italy, Orange Fiber last year produced more than 15,000 metres of fabric from more than 120 tonnes of citrus by-products; in Mexico, Desserto is using cacti to make leather for Mercedes and BMW cars, while in the Philippines, Bananatex are making fine leather for handbags in Switzerland, and there are many more examples from around the world. Here in the UK, a company called Upcycling Medical is using marine plastic waste, which would otherwise go into landfills, to make yarn, which is then made into medical clothing for the healthcare industry.
The volume of plastic waste we’re chucking into our rivers and oceans is still increasing, but so is the technology and the will to do something about it. Let’s hope we can stop the rot in time before we all absorb fatal quantities of nanoplastics and begin to become a waste product ourselves.
