Among the members of the solar system, there is one such girl who goes around, lined in plastic. They call it Earth and it is vox populi that its most recent rulers, humans, are the only species in the galaxy known to generate “garbage”. Such waste has been in crescendo because these Homo basurans ( it’s not known if they were ever sapiens) have drifted into a culture of having rather than being, which has made them compulsive consumers. Such is the level of garbage that even the space surrounding the Earth already has 10,100 tons of waste left behind since the 1950s when space missions began.

This trash-invaded girl was nicknamed plastic because the mass of all human-made plastics is now twice the mass of all land and marine animals combined. Plastic has seeped into every environment on Earth and can now be found everywhere from the heights of Mount Everest to the depths of the Mariana Trench. If current trends continue, by 2040 global plastic production will have doubled and plastic leaking into the ocean will have tripled.

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And so we become, as Rubén Blades’ song says, “…a plastic city of those I don’t want to see, with cancerous buildings and a heart of tinsel. Where instead of a sun dawns a dollar, where no one laughs, where no one cries, with people with polyester faces that listen without hearing and look without seeing. People who sold their raison d’être and their freedom for comfort”.

Such is the level that every July 3rd is the International Plastic Bag Free Day, with the objective of reducing the consumption of single-use plastic bags, because of the damage they cause to the environment and to living beings. But today I am not going to ask you to carry a cloth bag so as not to receive the plastic bag that we are past having left in oblivion; today I want you to broaden your perception of a problem that has to do with everyone and for which we must all work to solve.

Plastic is inexpensive and versatile, yes, and has countless uses in many industries. So inexpensive, in fact, that it is cheaper to make things from new plastic than from recycled plastic. Nearly half of all plastic produced on the planet is used to create single-use, short-lived products with a useful life of less than three years. Remember planned obsolescence, if it gets damaged soon, the foolish consumer will buy a new one. Unlike that short shelf life, plastic products can persist whole in the environment for decades or even centuries. That toothbrush that your mom shined your first tooth with… it’s still sitting in a landfill somewhere. Don’t believe that recycling is the solution and that your waste separation at home is a great contribution to planetary health. Worldwide, less than 10% of plastic products are recycled, so the only sensible way to reduce the impact is to reduce or eliminate its use, reuse the material already made, but above all innovate (or return to old habits) to use harmless or less harmful materials. By the way, I’m going to leave you on my Instagram @maisamundoverde the strategies I have for at least, not receiving plastic bags from now on.

Plastic pollutes, poisons and kills

Plastic has a cycle, not just of life but of permanence, quite long because it never “degrades” or “decomposes” like a plant or an animal that transforms into organic matter and nutrients available to be integrated back into the chain of life. Plastic simply breaks down to micro and nano sizes, very tiny particles that end up in our bloodstream and even in our breast milk. It is so ubiquitous in the environment around us that even if we didn’t use plastic at all in our homes, we would literally breathe it in from the air, drink it from the water.

If you have no empathy for the birds that vomit twisted masses of plastics that they mistook for food or die writhing in pain on the beaches of seas and rivers, or for the whales and dolphins with fins severed in fishing nets; every time you pedal the wheel of unnecessary plastic consumption, think about your health and that of your family. In all the stages that plastic goes through, from the extraction of the fossil fuels from which it is made, through manufacturing, the use of the objects and their management as waste in recycling, landfills and incinerators, toxins are emitted into the environment that reach our bodies by inhalation, ingestion or contact with the skin. These include benzene, PAHs, styrene, heavy metals, carcinogens, dioxins and furans, which cause liver and kidney damage, cancers, neurological and reproductive problems, mucosal irritation, damage to the endocrine, reproductive and cardiovascular systems, and developmental problems in newborns and children.

A global treaty to take the plastic out of the girl

We humans created this problem, but we have the knowledge and the means to solve it. Making a united front to achieve it is imperative, which is why in March 2022, after years of campaigning, the United Nations Environment Assembly agreed to develop a global treaty to end plastic pollution. Its goal, to agree on binding regulations across the entire life cycle of plastic to ban the most harmful plastics, reduce production and consumption, encourage reuse and recycling, and properly manage waste. This year, countries are working on the measures that will actually be included in the treaty, and negotiators hope to finalize the text by the end of 2024.

This treaty is important because global regulations will facilitate a level playing field in addressing the challenges of banning, phasing out and replacing with new materials that will both encourage innovation and facilitate trade. And in the short term, it will motivate the immediate and necessary decline of some of the most common forms of plastic that end up in the environment. The treaty should also plan and secure funding for processes, especially for developing countries, to help create a circular economy and fairer trade-offs and trade-offs where appropriate. In particular with informal waste workers who play a key role in the collection, sorting and recycling of plastics, to whom governments must give when establishing new, robust and fair regulations.

To contribute to this global task, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) commissioned the sustainability consultancy Eunomia to carry out a study that presented two reports identifying the plastic products with the greatest risk of contamination and the best way to control them. Both documents are a very useful input not only for the countries participating in the drafting of the treaty, but also for civil society to assess the size of the problem we face.

The research proposes as a priority the immediate global ban on the production and sale of the most harmful products, especially when plastic-free alternatives already exist. For example, unnecessary plastic fibers in products such as wet wipes, cigarette filters or tea bags; unnecessary single-use items such as cutlery, plastic plates and cups, ear tips or disposable electronic cigarettes; added microplastics such as microbeads in toothpaste and cosmetic products, antifouling applications in boat hulls and microplastics in industrial applications.

For high-risk products that cannot be easily disposed of, the research recommends measures to prevent contamination, promote circularity, minimize waste and manage it safely. Measures such as globally harmonized standards and requirements, economic incentives, measures to improve waste collection and recycling, extended producer responsibility systems (in which producers bear the cost of managing the plastics they put on the market) and deposit-return systems.

While high-risk plastic products are the ones the organization proposes to prioritize and address urgently, they are just the starting point of an effective and impactful treaty, which must be strengthened over time to cover all products, applications and materials. WWF’s research breaks down four major categories of plastic products from which I want to rescue information here because sometimes we do not dimension the plastic world we have created.

1. The packaging sector, responsible for the largest percentage of plastic production. It is estimated that between 31% and 44% of the 460 million tons of plastic produced worldwide in 2019 were used for packaging. These are divided into contact-sensitive or the type of packaging that can affect the properties of the product it contains such as food (fruit nets, bulk food bags, “mecato (snacks)” packages), cosmetics or pharmaceuticals (tubes of toothpaste, aerosol perfumes, shampoo and soap bottles, jars and bottles of creams, lotions and scrubs and beauty products such as tubes of lipstick and eyelashes), and non-contact sensitive such as stationery, household or electronic goods and their packaging.
2. Products with specific characteristics. They are divided into products containing non-woven plastic fibers such as absorbent hygiene products (diapers, sanitary napkins, incontinence pads or tampons), filters in engineering systems, wet wipes, cigarette butts, disposable vacuum cleaner filters or plastic tea bags. And in rigid or flexible plastics such as cups, cutlery, plates, bags and more durable products such as furniture, toys, car tires and synthetic textiles.
3. Products from specific (productive) sectors where two in particular stand out, whose plastic products are discarded in and around natural ecosystems: fishing – aquaculture and agriculture. In fishing, lost or discarded nets, fishing gear and other equipment (known as “ghost nets”) are deadly for aquatic fauna. In agriculture, plastics such as film can come into direct contact with soil (mulch film, silage film and greenhouse tunnels) and microplastic particles can leach into soils and waterways.
4. Microplastics – tiny plastic particles up to 5 mm in size – and nanoplastics – microscopic plastic particles down to 0.0001 mm – are the least visible but most insidious form of plastic pollution. They are easily ingested and tend to bioaccumulate in the food chain, with the harmful effects on the health of wildlife and humans that I have already mentioned. They are divided into primary or manufactured so tiny to be used in microbeads in toothpaste, skin care products and exfoliants; antifouling coatings on ship hulls; and microplastics used in industrial applications such as printer inks, spray paints and injection molds. This category also includes pellets, flakes and powders produced to make other types of plastic. And there are the secondary microplastics that come from the decomposition of other products.

What a staggering number of products have plastic in them! Sometimes I wonder if we will be able to rescue the minimum necessary in sectors such as health, perhaps, and if we will have enough inventiveness and good sense to welcome an era without a material that got out of hand and turned the Earth into a plastic girl. Rubén Blades says,

“From the dust we all come and there we will return as the song says … Remember that plastic melts, if the sun gives it full sun”.

Picking up space garbage is hard, so let’s at least justify the sapiens and commit to cleaning up this planet of wonderful landscapes and ecosystems that we turned into a dumping ground. Let’s return the Earth to the integrity of its beauty and health so that one day we can say in relieved past tense that “it was a plastic girl”.

You can download and read the complete reports, the first one, “Identification of High Risk Plastic Products”, and the second one “Regulation of High Risk Plastic Products” at the following links:

Link 1.

Link 2.

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