Now, let’s dive into PLASTIC!
Nowadays, almost everything we touch, eat, work and move with, has some plastic inside, or around it. Even our medical devices and the clothes we wear! How many things can you think of that DO NOT CONTAIN ANY PLASTIC?
Not many, right? PLASTIC IS LITERALLY EVERYWHERE.
Yet, how much do YOU know about it?
Watch this short video to find it all out!
Plastic has not always been man-made! 3500 years ago, it was collected for the first time from gum trees!! This means plastic has been around for a long time and can be 100% natural!
Why is it not then? During the mid-19th and 20th centuries, it started to be produced synthetically from fossil fuels as it was both CHEAPER AND FASTER! Since then, the amount of plastic produced weighs a total of around 9.2 billion tonnes - that’s the equivalent of nearly 1600 Great Pyramids of Giza!!
So, let’s summarize why plastic became so popular:
- Creating plastic from fossil fuels is very cheap, and fast.
- The material is very versatile! Plastic is made of flexible polymers (aka long chains of chemical compounds) that, when heated, are easily shaped into whatever we want.
- Plastic is extremely resistant, which is also why it is so hard to get rid of it. It takes between 500 and 1000 years to decompose!
But can we make it disappear faster? Is there a way to break plastics down, back to their original polymers? To answer, let’s jump into the world of BIODEGRADATION.