The Problem With Plastics: A Material Designed to Last Forever, Consumed For Disposability

What to do, what to do...

Psychologists like to do word association- we do, too.

So, what’s the first word that comes to mind when you think of plastic? “Bottle,” maybe? Perhaps “pollution?” How about, “oxymoron?” When I think of plastic, I think of the word oxymoron. The New Oxford American Dictionary defines the word as “a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction.” An example would be “pretty ugly,” or “big baby,” or even “honest politician” (we particularly like this one).

The first plastics were called parkesine, and were patented by Alexander Parkes, In Birmingham, UK in 1856. Up until the 1950’s, plastics were used scarcely- mostly for electric and engine parts. Plastics started showing up in the 1930’s and 1940’s in the form of radios, telephones, clocks, and even billiard balls. Then the “Disposable Life” became popular, where plastics were meant to save the modern housewife from the drudgery of so much housework. Why wash your dishes when you can just THROW THEM AWAY!

Apparently, something is written in stone.

Sounds awesome. I know I hate doing dishes. But this is where we went very, very wrong- where the word oxymoron comes into play. Plastics, which are designed to last “forever,” are appropriated to throw away. 

Disposable Plastic- one of the saddest, scariest oxymorons of the 21^st century.

We have solid, scientific evidence that plastics take 1,000 years+ to break down on land- about half that time in water- and yet we aren’t concerned with this when we choose to use all those convenient single-use plastic items.

Think of it this way: that water bottle that you purchased, that you drank from for 5 minutes, will now take at least 500 years to go away.

And as we already discussed (a thousand times, it seems like), it doesn’t actually go away. Through photodegradation, plastics become brittle and break down into smaller and smaller particles. They leak toxic chemicals into our drinking water and soils. The plastic slurry in our bodies of water get eaten by fish and work its way up our food chain, right back into our own bodies.

All for a quick drink on the go.

Does that seem totally backwards to ANYBODY? It seems incredibly wrong to us.

Jumbo Shrimp??

We reject all single-use plastics, because plastics should NEVER have been disposable! We have latched onto a sick, twisted, and false idea of what is disposable. Things that can actually biodegrade, at a reasonable rate, and that don’t poison us- such as corn starch and other organic materials- should be allowable as disposable. Would you try and make a compost in your backyard out of any other material that took 1,000 years to break down? No way! You’d never have any soil- you’d only have a pile of trash.

And herein lies another aspect of the problem- once you take your 5-minute water break and throw that bottle into the waste bin (or the recycling bin, if you’re remotely responsible), or after you throw away that plastic bag you brought home from the grocery store, you never have to think about it ever again. If we could see how much trash we actually accumulate- if it was in our faces, in our very own yards- we might feel differently.

Most of us don’t have to see it and certainly never have to think about it again if we don’t want to. But we’re smarter and better than that! We are intelligent enough that we should stop fooling ourselves into thinking that plastics aren’t a problem. We have gotten stuck in this terrifying paradox, thinking plastics are ok to use without care.

It’s not ok, and it’s time to start making better choices. It’s not just the Earth we’re trying to salvage- it’s humanity as a whole, too.

Refuse the use of single-use, “disposable” plastics because they don’t ever go away.

Thanks for reading, and for REFUSING with us!