in the environment, plastic degrades and living with it – Liberation

Once you have finished reading this, take a few seconds to observe yourself and your immediate surroundings: your glasses or their pouch, your pen, your shoes and even some of your clothes, the case of your cell phone, the carpet of your smile, the bottle of water that the salad bar slipped into your bag because its price was included in the menu. Take a good look: plastic is everywhere. We are addicted to it and the planet is dying of it, literally intoxicated by all this waste that we continuously reject in nature each year (which represents the weight of 35,000 Eiffel towers). Their quantity has doubled in the world for twenty years and could triple by 2060. And, for the time being, only 9% is recycled, which is to say three times nothing. Plastic was a sign of modernity in the 1970s, like the tam-tam stool, of which most homes had at least one example. It was then loved in orange color, perhaps because it was a symbol of life and energy. Today we flee it, or rather we try, and if we had to give it a color, it would rather be black, the color of anguish.

As our survey reminds us, plastic, very persistent in the environment, degrades into micro and nanoparticles that pollute the air, soil, water and all ecosystems to the point that we are sure to ingest at least five grams a week, the equivalent of a credit card. So, we carry on as if nothing had happened? This is the whole point of the discussions that are taking place these days in Paris with a view to arriving at an international text on plastic pollution. To hope to get rid of this scourge, a binding agreement would be needed which pushes the industrialists concerned, those of fossil fuels and petrochemicals, to drastically reduce production, but they do not hear it that way, determined to preserve the manna. The delegates of the States must not have their hands shaking, it is about the future of all of us. To help them, we consumers have an obvious lever: the drastic limitation of plastic in our immediate environment.