In the past century, human beings have extracted and consumed more petroleum than ever before, causing severe environmental problems such as climate change and air pollution. Meanwhile, as a byproduct of petrochemistry, the polymer is playing an important role in our daily consumer goods in the form of plastic, polyester, synthetic fibers, and more.
encounter
In order to find out what’s inside our everyday trash, we did a trash diary to document the categories of things we threw away.
A big part of our trash is plastic products, especially plastic containers.
start with the billiard ball
In1869, the first synthetic polymer was invented by John Wesley, who was inspired by a company that offered ten thousand dollars to anyone who could provide a substitute for ivory. Polymer is a material that is made of long chains of molecules. It was the first human manufactured things that were not constrained by the limits of nature. Meanwhile, it was also the first time that humans manufactured something that did not engage in the ecology of nature.
Ivory Billiard Ball, National Museum of American History
Polymer Billiard Balls Today
It was the first time that human manufacturing was not constrained by the limits of nature.
It was the first time that human created something that does not engage in natural ecology.
It was the first time that human created absolute trash, which is permanent entropy in our ecosystem on Earth.
the boom of plastic
After that, the first fully synthetic plastic was Bakelite made by Leo Baekeland in 1907. It was made as an electrical insulator.
During WW2, the scarce natural resources stimulated the expansion of plastic industry, which produced a range of products from parachute to helmet liner even airplane windows. The production of plastic has been increased ever since.
In 2015 alone, the world had produced more than 381 million tons of plastic. In comparison, If the entire human population stepped on a scale, the weight would be 316 million tons.
Discarded synthetic polymers fit in nowhere in the circulation of matters of the natural ecology. They are unusable entropy occupying the limited mass, resources and room on Earth.
Accumulatively, human has produced more than 7 billion tons of plastic as of 2015, which means there are already more than 7 billion tons of non degradable and unnatural substances on the spaceship Earth.
eating a credit card
A study from MBERC concluded that people could be ingesting the equivalent of a credit card of plastic on a week, mainly in plastic infused drinking water and seafood, which tend to be eaten microplastic in the ocean.
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A recent study from the team of Professor Dick Vethaak at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam shows the first indication that we have polymer particles in our blood.
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A team of researchers at Hull York Medical School in the UK analyzed lung tissue taken from 13 patients undergoing surgeries and found microplastics in all levels of the lungs — upper, middle, and lower lung regions.
The types of plastic they found are most commonly used in soft drink bottles, food packaging, and bits of machinery.
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“We’re eating them, we’re inhaling them. And we don’t really know how they react with our bodies once they are in.”
“Once the plastic is in the environment, we can’t really get it out.”
- Evangelos Danopoulos, Hull York Medical School