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This is not about demonizing plastic.
The problem, as professor and expert in material cultures Carolina Agudelo says, is not the material itself, “but what we have done with it.”
If polyester, for example, a synthetic fiber made entirely of plastic, which is in many of our dresses, is almost eternal: why are we making pieces with it that last, at most, six months in the closet?
If a disposable cup made of plastic takes 75 years to degrade, why is its useful life only 5 minutes?
Many factors led us to perpetuate this strange and disproportionate equation that made us go from 1.5 million tons of plastic produced in 1950 to the exponential sum of 390 million tons of plastic in 2022.
Experts point to some historical factors as the major triggers for this debacle.
“The hygiene unleashed after the World Wars made us think that it was a mandate that food always be hermetically sealed.
Why did it suddenly begin to seem dangerous to us that rice, sugar, grains, oil were in large containers and bought by weight in stores like our grandparents did?” asks Laura Novik, academic and consultant in design of sustainable futures.
Another factor that encouraged this plastic crisis was the need aroused by brands and supermarket chains to have a malleable canvas (plastic comes from the Greek “plastikos”, meaning it can be molded) that could acquire different shapes and colors and add slogans. printed to be able to differentiate one from another.
“The plastic crisis is linked to the need for brands to have packaging for marketing,” adds Novik.
For its part, the development of thermoplastic polymers such as polyethylene and polypropylene, which allowed the mass manufacturing of economical containers to store and transport products, revealed to companies, since the 70s and 80s, that they could change a model circular for a linear one, apparently more economical.
The circular demanded that, for example, glass soda bottles had to be returned to the store in order to purchase a new bottle.
The linear model, on the other hand, enacted that companies did not have to collect plastic packaging from their products, because those packaging were now trash.
More recently, the skyrocketing rise in digital shopping has led to 36% more packaging per item than in-store shopping.
Dismantling this scaffolding deeply rooted in consumer society and the culture that things for humans are always easier and faster has been very complex, despite the fact that on the horizon there are several biomaterials that are revealed to be better options than plastic in terms of its use time and degradation time ratio.
“As an industry derived from oil, plastic has a low cost and great lobbying power to influence countries' laws.
We also live in a culture where packaging has become so cheap that companies don't include the value of the packaging in the value of their product, so as consumers we've gotten used to not paying for that.
So any change in the price of packaging is still unthinkable for companies today,” explains Martín Ramírez, creator of Cáscara Tech, a company that sees shells as the fundamental packaging of life, and that has been exploring bagasse for three years. of cane, the use of corn bioplastic and, in general, biomass, to make food packaging and containers for large restaurant chains.
What his investigations into materials have revealed to Martín Ramírez—which involves experimenting with leaves in India, understanding the beauty of packaging in Japan, and the forms of mass production in China—is that what has brought us here is not A loyalty to plastic is a loyalty to practicality, and above all, to economics.
Empty water bottles collected for recycling in Montevideo, Uruguay, in June 2023. Matilde Campodonico (AP)
“Consumers are ecological from the waist up, from the narrative, but when action is required, when it hits their pocket, they stop being so,” explains the industrial designer who has managed to create a product that is beautiful, useful, but which can be 30% more expensive than traditional plastic packaging.
“The problem is also that the value of packaging is being put in price and not in cost.
If they charged styrofoam (styrofoam) for all the time it is not used and the environmental cost it has for the planet, it would have to be very expensive.”
According to Martín's calculations, one of his 100% compostable salad take-out bowls can take from 2 weeks to 6 months to degrade, a figure considerably less than the 75 years it would last if that packaging were placed on a salad bar in a restaurant. restaurant out of plastic.
Although many companies give false hope to their intentions to generate less waste by claiming that the plastic they use is 100% recyclable, a study published in 2021 by Greenpeace US assures that this idea of circularity with plastic “is a fantasy”, once that, for example, of the 51 million tons of plastic waste generated by American households in 2021, only 5%, that is, 2.4 million tons, was recycled.
Experts such as Carolina Agudelo, a materials consultant, detail the great difficulty of this recycling procedure: “Plastic recycling has several issues: the difficulty of collection, the excess of energy and water in the process, the microplastic waste in the wastewater and, above all, the difficulty faced by the immense variety of plastics and complex mixtures that the industry has generated.”
According to the expert, in order to easily recycle a glass, for example, it could not have paper, as is the case with the glasses that became popular in coffee shops and that consumers believe are less polluting.
“As it is a mixture between paper and plastic, this makes the process of recycling the material almost impossible.”
In the case of a garment, for there to be effective recycling of synthetic textiles, first, it could not have combinations such as cotton, polyester or spandex and, second, the entire garment would have to have only one material in its buttons, zippers, in their closures and that almost never happens.
Politicizing plastic: where are the laws?
To change this culture, which has been called “addiction to plastic” by the UN, we have opted less for a regulatory and restrictive framework that forces companies to take responsibility for their plastic waste and the garbage in their packaging, and more in Try to get the consumer to self-regulate and take actions in their daily lives to generate less waste.
“We must defend the politicization of sustainability.
It's time to politicize plastic!
The rules make us regulate ourselves, make agreements as a society and those agreements have not yet been made in the face of this problem,” says Laura Novik, very much in line with the demands made by other experts.
“They have held us, individuals, responsible for the way we consume, but it is urgent to think in terms of public policies about placing the responsibility of recycling on the shoulders of each of us.
It is the laws that could demarcate the limits for the industry, instead of seeking stoic behavior in a hyper-accelerated consumer society like the contemporary one.
The echo of the urgency of legislation was heard loudly in May 2023, when the report of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) provided recommendations to act against the environmental catastrophe of plastic by prioritizing the reduction of its manufacture. and its greater reuse, but leaving aside specific actions that force companies to regulate themselves: “The report fails to require industrial/business entities that produce material items to stop manufacturing more toxic plastic from fossil fuels, period,” Dianna Cohen, CEO and co-founder of the Plastic Pollution Coalition, told Wired magazine at the time.
A member of the Alterra Energy company works at the shredded plastic storage area in Akron, Ohio, in 2022. Keith Srakocic (AP)
"At the moment when ecology becomes a priority, because it is not yet a priority for industries, two possible solutions are seen: ecological taxes that make plastic pay more taxes, which will be used to clean up the damage it generates, or that They remove VAT from ecological products, biomaterials, so that they can compete on price,” explains Martín Ramírez.
"Because if you tell companies that they have to choose between ecological and non-ecological packaging and it doesn't matter to them, they will tell you that they choose ecological, but until we achieve that price comparison, it will be very It is difficult for there to be that turn,” adds the creator of Cáscara Tech.
Explorations with papers that can be heat-sealed without having plastics in their composition, iterations of bioplastics that use resins, the use of sugar cane bagasse, derivatives of starch, fungi and algae are some of the most promising developments. for plastic replacement.
“In materials science, one of the main objectives is the development of biocomposites or biodegradable materials.
In this sense, living materials and forms of production based on the cultivation of materials mark a possible future horizon to say goodbye to plastics,” concludes Novick, who hopes, with a bit of pessimism, that we are finally witnessing archeology. of a future culture without plastic packaging.