Getting rid of straws and other single-use plastics, recycling and reducing our consumerism are noble efforts but a fundamental redesign of our global value chains is needed to tackle plastic waste, says the University of Denver’s Jack Buffington.
Jack Buffington Channel NewsAsia 13 Feb 19;
DENVER, Colorado: Plastic is everywhere, even in the most remote places on earth such as the deepest depths of the Pacific Ocean in the Mariana Trench, to the highest peak of Mount Everest.
But no place has been as negatively impacted by plastic waste as the fastest growing nations of Asia, where the United Nations has hailed the growing situation over plastic waste a “planetary crisis”.
A WORLD OF PLASTIC
Peak Plastic describes the point in time when the benefit of the next piece of plastic provides is outweighed by its irreversible damage to the environment, a timeline that will happen in the next eleven years.
Peak Plastic will occur in some places much sooner according to some studies, in the developing communities of China, Indonesia and Philippines where the production of plastic waste are already at a crisis level.
Worldwide, plastic production and use is growing at a 10 per cent rate, but in the developing regions of Asia, it is growing much faster than the existing waste management infrastructure can handle, leading to a large majority of the 9 million tonnes a year of plastic that is dumped into our oceans every year.
By 2050, it is possible that there will be more plastic in our oceans than fish, a scenario that seems almost impossible to believe given 71 per cent of the earth is covered by oceans.
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