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| Sunday, 23 June 2002 |
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by Hana Ibrahim Plastic: Light, durable and versatile, plastics have revolutionised modern living. Convenient, inexpensive, seemingly practical they have become a necessary evil in our use and discard lifestyle. The salesman at the corner grocery stores doesn't think twice when he packs our purchases in a plastic bag. The supermarket has each item conveniently wrapped in yards of plastic. The milk now comes in plastic bottles, so does the curd, the ice cream, butter and margarine. Most of the food items we buy already come ready packed in plastic bottles, boxes,jars and other myriad containers. And not to be outdone, we go out and by colourful plastic boxes and jars to store our dry foods, condiments and our left over food item in the refrigerator. Given our infatuation with all things plastic, is it any wonder that Sri Lanka has the dubious honour of being among the top users of plastic bags with a per capita usage of 5kgs of plastic each year. Should we be surprised? Not really. But we should be concerned. For no matter how convenient or popular plastic is, its ubiquity also means huge environmental problems. Consider these factors: - Plastics are inert and will not degrade no matter how they are disposed of. - Their basic raw material is oil, a finite resource. - The energy and raw material used in the production of plastic should not be wasted by burial in a landfill site. Plastics have the recyclers stumped Unlike other forms of packaging, plastic cannot be recycled. Researchers working on the problem haven't come up with an economical reuse, partly because the chemical composition of plastic waste must be sorted, creating obvious collection problems. While is difficult to sort out the variety of plastic types used singly and in combination in bags, bottles, cartons, containers, tubes and wrappings, make recycling near impossible, the difficulties involved in extracting these materials from the waste stream in a clean enough form to separate and then reprocess them makes it hardly worth the while. On a small scale, a few companies have successfully collected and recycled easily recognisable containers like milk jugs, fruit trays and egg cartons. Several companies in the UK manufacture products from mixed plastic. But the range is limited to fence posts and road cones. Still other groups are experimenting with using mixed plastic waste for insulation, packing material, soil conditioners, and low-stress building material. Another promising possibility is the use of plastic waste to produce fuel through pyrolysis, a thermal decomposition process. Plastic recycling may be economically feasible in the future, but it's not workable now. So there are virtually no markets for scrap plastic. As a result most recycling centres will not accept it. The only way to be ecologically responsible about plastic is to buy little as possible and reuse as much as possible of what you must buy. Beginning next week, we will be traversing the world of plastics to look at some of the 'reuse' options that are easy to follow and useful to boot. |
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