Of the 8,300 million tonnes of virgin plastic produced up to the end of 2015, 6,300 million tonnes has been discarded. Most of that plastic waste is still with us, entombed in landfills or polluting the environment. Microplastics have been found in Antarctic sea ice, in the guts of animals that live in the deepest ocean trenches, and in drinking water around the world. In fact, plastic waste is now so widespread that researchers have suggested it could be used as a geological indicator of the Anthropocene.
Today, the packaging industry is by far the biggest user of virgin plastic. But we also use plastic in plenty of longer-lasting ways too: it's in our buildings, transport, and other vital infrastructure, not to mention our furniture, appliances, TVs, carpets, phones, clothes, and countless other everyday objects.
But what if we could wave a magic wand and remove all plastics from our lives? For the sake of the planet, it would be a tempting prospect – but we'd quickly find out just how far plastic has seeped into every aspect of our existence. Is life as we know it even possible without plastic?
All this means a world entirely without plastic is unrealistic. But imagining how our lives would change if we suddenly lost access to plastic can help us figure out how to forge a new, more sustainable relationship with it.
Imagine trying to run a dialysis unit with no plastic
In hospitals, the loss of plastic would be devastating.
Plastic is used in gloves, tubing, syringes, blood bags, sample tubes and more. Since the discovery of variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (vCJD) in 1996 – caused by misfolded proteins called prions that can survive normal hospital sterilisation processes – standard reusable surgical instruments have even been replaced by single-use versions for some operations. According to one study, a single tonsillectomy operation in a UK hospital can result in more than 100 separate pieces of plastic waste. While some surgeons have argued that single-use plastic is overused in hospitals, right now many plastic medical items are essential, and lives would be lost without them.
Some everyday plastic items are also vital for protecting health. Condoms and diaphragms are on the World Health Organization's list of essential medicines, and face masks – including plastic-based surgical masks and respirators, as well as reusable cloth masks – have helped slow the spread of the Covid-19 virus.
Our food system would also quickly unravel. We use packaging to protect food from damage in transit and preserve it long enough to reach supermarket shelves, but also for communication and marketing.
It's not just consumers that would need to change their habits – supermarket supply chains are optimised for selling packaged produce, and would need overhauling. In the meantime, highly perishable goods with long journeys between farm and supermarket, such as asparagus, green beans, and berries, might end up left in fields, unpicked.
If we could solve those supply chain issues, fruit and vegetables could be sold loose, but we might need to shop more frequently. Research by UK waste reduction charity WRAP found that plastic packaging extended the shelf life of broccoli by a week when kept in the fridge, and bananas 1.8 days at room temperature – though for apples, cucumber, and potatoes, the plastic made no difference. In fact, the research found that food waste could even be reduced by selling fruit and veg loose, as it allowed people to buy only what they needed.
Even tins of tomatoes and beans would be out – they have an inner plastic coating to protect the food – so we'd have to buy dried pulses in paper bags and cook them at home instead.
Swapping out plastic packaging would have knock-on environmental effects. While glass has some advantages over plastic, such as being endlessly recyclable, a one litre glass bottle can weigh as much as 800g compared to a 40g plastic one. This results in glass bottles having a higher overall environmental impact compared to plastic containers for milk, fruit juice, and fizzy drinks, for example. When those heavier bottles and jars need to be transported over long distances, carbon emissions grow even more. And if the vehicles they're transported in don't contain plastic, they themselves will be heavier, which means even more emissions.
In some ways, though, changing food packaging would be the easy part. You might buy milk in a glass bottle, but plastic tubing is used in the dairy industry to get that milk from cow to bottle. Even if you buy vegetables loose, sheets of plastic mulch may have helped the farmer who grew them save water and keep away weeds. Without plastic, industrial agriculture as we know it would be impossible.
Instead, we'd need shorter food chains – think farm shops and community-supported agriculture. But with over half of the global population now living in cities, this would require huge changes in where and how we grow food.
Living without plastic would also require a shift in how we dress. In 2018, 62% of the textile fibres produced worldwide were synthetic, made from petrochemicals. While cotton and other natural fibres like hemp would be good substitutes for some of our clothing, scaling up production to match current demand would come with a cost. Cotton already grows on 2.5% of arable land worldwide, but the crop accounts for 16% of insecticide use, risking the health of farmers and contaminating water supplies. Without plastic, we'd need to ditch fast fashion in favour of more durable items we can wear again and again.
There would be upsides to a world without plastic, though: we'd escape the harmful effects it has on our health.
Turning oil and gas into plastic releases toxic gases that pollute the air and impact local communities. What's more, chemicals added during the production of plastics can disrupt the endocrine system, which produces hormones that regulate our growth and development. Two of the most well-studied of these endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) are phthalates, used to soften plastic but also found in many cosmetics, and bisphenol A (BPA), used to harden plastic and commonly used in the lining of tins.
Some phthalates can lower testosterone production, reducing sperm counts and increasing fertility problems in men. BPA, on the other hand, mimics oestrogen and has been linked with an increased risk of reproductive problems in women. But the effects extend beyond fertility.They have been linked to numerous adverse health effects in almost all biological systems, not just the reproductive system but also the immunological, neurological, metabolic, and cardiovascular systems.
Exposure to EDCs during critical periods of foetal growth can have long-lasting effects.If the mother is pregnant, and she is exposed to plastics or other chemicals that alter the development of her foetus, those changes are lifelong, irreversible changes.
Maybe we reach a time where every animal we pull out of the water doesn't have microplastics in it
In a plastic-free world, making new kinds of plastic out of plants might start to look tempting.
Bio-based plastics that have many of the same qualities as petrochemical plastics are already in use. Corn starch-based polylactic acid (PLA), for example, is used to make straws are almost indistinguishable from their fossil fuel plastic counterparts – unlike paper straws that can end up soggy before you finish your drink. Bio-based plastics can be made from the edible parts of plants like sugar or corn, or from plant material that isn't fit for consumption, like bagasse, the pulp left over after crushing sugarcane.
However, making plastic from plants wouldn't necessarily solve health problems stemming from the material. While research on the topic is scarce, it's likely that similar additives to those used in conventional plastics would also be used in bio-based alternatives,This is because the properties the materials need are the same.
It's clear that replacing one material with another won't solve all our plastic problems.
Here's already a push to figure out which plastics are unnecessary, avoidable, and problematic, with several countries, including the China,US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands region, aiming to phase these out. To go even further than that, we could decide to only use plastics that we really, truly need.
The biggest shift we'd face, then, would be re-evaluating our throwaway culture. We'd need to change not just how we consume items – from clothes and food to washing machines and phones – but how we produce them too.We're too quick to buy something cheap and disposable, where we ought to be making things so they are compatible, and there's more standardisation, so things can be swapped out and mended.
Without plastic, we might even have to change the way we talk about ourselves.Consumer is inherently a single-use term. In a world where packaging is reused and repurposed, not thrown out, we might become citizens instead.
Perhaps we'd also discover that, for all the genuine good plastic has done, not all of the lifestyle changes it has enabled have been positive.without it our schedules might need to be a little less frantic.If that was all taken away, life would slow down."But Would that be such a bad thing?"
