Developed for a throwaway culture, plastics have caused significant pollution to our natural environments with 90% of all plastics ever created never being recycled.
Our sheer volume and demand for materials has grown faster than our ability to catch up with waste infrastructure. Tangibly this means that even if you end up putting your waste in the right bins at home, the likelihood is that this waste will either end up in landfill or being incinerated.
Sometimes this waste is even shipped abroad where there is even less infrastructure to deal with it - out of sight should not mean out of mind.
Toxic Plastics
Recent studies have identified that the impact of plastics goes beyond pollution to chemicals and micro-plastics that impact human and environmental health.
There are over 16,000 chemicals designed to make plastics cheaper, faster to make, more transparent, more robust etc. Unfortunately the effect of these plastics on human health is little understood, to date over 4000 of them have been tested and shown to be toxic to human health with the remaining 12,000 yet to be tested.
While these chemicals may be at the threshold limits in virgin material, there are no regulations in place to monitor their levels through recycling. As a consequence, each time a product is recycled the likelihood of these limits being breached increases drastically.
