The Impact of Plastic on the Environment

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In our daily life, plastics can be known as the most common material that people used in different aspects. This kind of material belongs to synthetic or semisynthetic organic polymers, which mean that they are macromolecules consisting of many repeating monomer units. And for their elementary composition, plastics always contains hydrogen and carbon (Helmenstine, 2018). For the properties of the plastic material, it has the ability to be molded or shaped easily, and it has numerous characteristics like corrosion resistance, impact resistance, low electronic conductivity as well as low-cost and durability (eMachineShop).

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Attributed to plastics’ properties, nowadays it has been closely integrated into every aspect of modern life. For instance, there are three kinds of plastics that are being used in every field. First is polyethylene terephthalate also known as PET. It mostly being used for packagings like water or other soft drink bottles, quick-frozen food or takeout trays. Also, PET has been used has some special cloth like polar fleece and emergency blankets.

The second kind of plastic is high density polyethylene, known as HDPE, we can saw them on many daily uses, like shopping bags, water bottle caps, vehicular tank and some common pipelines. The last one is polyvinyl chloride, most people might be more familiar with the name “PVC”. It is one of the most versatile plastic material, it can be used for furniture, water bottle, artificial leather and some medical instruments (Alem).

Even though the plastics helped human a lot in our life, however because we didn’t reclaim the resources efficiently, also keep wasting the resources and producing new plastics, the global environment has been jeopardized.

From the estimation, the factories around the world produce 400 million tonnes of plastics and many experts predict that the global production will increase fourfold until the year of 2050 (Qualman, 2017). According to the data collected by Great Britain's Royal Statistical Society, there only nine percent of usage of plastics are being recycled around the world, this statistic is striking, but the result suggests that we are using plastics to damage the environment on earth. And according to the data collected by the National Geographic Society, there are about 18 billion bonds of plastic waste has been dumped into the ocean, and these wastes are all came from coastal areas every year. And 40 percents of plastics products were packagings, they were being wasted after just used once (Parker, 2018).

Because of the wastes of plastics and plastic littering, it finally caused a serious environmental implication, which is plastic pollution. People can found a big amount of plastic debris that was being discarded on the beach, coast area and river bank etc. Even though, the wide use of plastics has brought us more convenience in our daily life, but every coin has two sides, so do plastics. Because of the low price of plastics, it has been abused. But regards to its property, it is hard to decompose, so when human are disposing of these materials like open burning, the possibility of air and land pollution will be increased. Moreover, the ways of people disposing of plastics are problematical. Sometimes people will choose to burn the plastics for the waste disposition, however the process of burning the plastics is very toxic, and it will release toxin in that specific area, thus give rise to air pollution. And the another way of disposing the resources is that people just discarded them into waste yard or the refuse landfill.

For many discarded plastic products, they contained tiny plastic beads. So if they were being swept down to the sink or underground, it will rise a chance damage the environment and these toxic pollutants will be allowed to pollute the underground water (Rinkesh). So for solving this problem, scientists decided to use biodegradable plastics to substitute common traditional plastics to save the environments. Biodegradable plastic is a new kind of plastic that can be decomposed into the environment naturally. The raw material of biodegradable plastics are completely different from traditional plastics, that they used natured botanical based material including corn oil, orange peels and starch, instead of chemical fillers. During the process of disposal, the surrounding bacterias and fungus will metabolized the plastics, to help them to degrade the structure of biodegradable plastics further.

So compared to the common plastics, the disposal process of the biodegradable plastics is naturally and environmental friendly, that will have a smaller effect of environment hazard on air, water and soil, also the time for it degradation will be much shorter than traditional plastics. Because for common plastics they will need hundreds or thousands years to discompose it (XL Plastics). And the reason why it is environmental friendly is that this kind of plastic is generally compostable. During the metabolization with the fungus and bacterias, the plastics will deteriorate into harmless natural materials that is mixed with soil. The starch corn molecules in the biodegradable plastic will absorb water in the soil and expand, then the expansion will affect the plastics to split into plenty of tiny fragments, that bacterias can metabolize and digest more easily, and this process only takes few weeks to complete (Woodford, 2018).