It has been 117 years since the advent of synthetic plastic, so, literally no one alive today has lived in an entirely plastic-free world and no one ever will. From 1907, when it was first produced under the brand ‘Bakelite’ to today, plastic has consumed the world in all aspects. While plastic is a necessary product in the healthcare industry, globally, it has also become the most used material. Its durability, once marvelled at, is now a curse: plastic bottles made today will still be around in the year 2400, perhaps longer.
The Belgian chemist Leo Baekeland, who invented Bakelite, was an innovator whose company developed the first commercially successful photographic paper, which he sold to the entity known today as Kodak. After he was granted the patent for his synthetic plastic product by the US Patent and Trademark Office in 1909, Bakelite took off. Soon there were telephones, radios and even coffins made of the product that by 1944 appeared in some 15,000 applications. Leo Baekeland was quoted as saying that he had ventured into the field to make money. He did.
A century later, Bakelite is vintage. Today’s plastics are the insidious polystyrene, polyethylene (PE) and polyethylene terephthalate (PET). The applications are so varied they almost cannot be counted. They are used everywhere, by everyone, often almost unthinkingly and channel billions of dollars into the already lucrative oil and gas industry. They have continued the course set by Baekeland and outstripped him in every sense, the very worst being the utter pollution endangering both the planet and human health.
Over the years, the industry has used language and advertisements as placebos in an attempt to lull the undiscerning into a false sense of security. They pushed PET as recyclable without divulging that it is unlikely to maintain its quality during that process. The degradation that occurs not only generates waste, but makes it expensive. The reality is that of the almost 35 million tonnes of PET produced every year, only about nine percent is recycled. The rest of it ends up in landfills, in the ocean, or is burned. As terrible as that is, it gets worse. The actual making of PET products is highly polluting. Some 90 percent of greenhouse gas emissions associated with plastics occur at the processing stage. Further, from beginning to end, microplastics are released. These miniscule particles that are invisible to the human eye, find their way into air, water, soil, in the stomachs of fish, and in the placentas of pregnant women. In fact scientists have estimated that the average person could easily unknowingly ingest about five grammes of microplastics a week.
These are among the reasons why the UN Environment Assembly’s Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) session, billed for next week in Ottawa, Canada, is supremely important. The objective of the INC is to develop an internationally binding instrument on plastic pollution. This is the fourth session, billed as INC-4. The first was held at the end of 2022, the second in June 2023, and the third in November last year. INC-5 is set for November this year in South Korea.
Ideally, this treaty will be in place by 2025, although there has been push back and lobbying by the oil and gas and plastics industries, which are against phasing out, and claiming that they are investing in recycling. This hoax has been pulled on the world for years. Hopefully leaders will rally against it this time around.
Several countries, including Rwanda, Kenya, St Kitts and Nevis, Bangladesh and France are ahead of the treaty and have already banned single-use plastics. Guyana, as has been said in this column before, missed an opportunity when it failed to follow up on the styrofoam ban which came into effect in 2016. Nevertheless, it is not too late to begin to move in that direction right now.
In the face of its oil and gas exploitation, a ban on single-use plastics – bags, bottles and straws – is not only the right thing to do but necessary. It would, for example, drastically reduce solid waste, which is at peak crisis right now, particularly in the city. Further, eliminating a source of pollution would surely fall within the green objectives the government is touting. Obviously, it is not going to be a popular decision, particularly with the private sector. However, governing a country is not a popularity contest, it is about doing what is in the best interests of all the people.
