Originally, plastic was hailed for its potential to reduce humankind’s heavy environmental footprint. The earliest plastic were invented as substitutes for shrinking supplies of natural materials like ivory or tortoiseshell. Today, plastic is perceived as nature’s nemesis. But a generic distaste for plastic can muddy our thinking about the trade-offs involved when we replace plastic with other materials.
Take plastic bags, the emblem for all bad things. They clog storm drains, tangle up recycling equipment, litter parks and beaches and threaten wildlife on land and at sea. Such problems have fueled bans on bags around the world and in more than a dozen American cities. Unfortunately, the bans typically lead to a huge increase in the use of paper bags, which also have environmental drawbacks. In other words, plastics aren’t necessarily bad for the environment; its the way we make and use them that’s the problem.
It’s estimated that half of the nearly 600 billion pounds of plastics produced each, year go into single-use products. Some are indisputably valuable, like disposable syringes, which have been a great ally in preventing the spread of infectious diseases like HIV and even plastic water bottles, which, after diseases like the Japanese tsunami, are critical to saving lives. Yet many disposables, like the bags, drinking straws and packaging commonly found in beach clean-ups, are essentially prefab litter with a heavy environmental cost.
And there’s another cost. Pouring so much plastic into disposable conveniences has helped to diminish our view of a family of materials we once held in high esteem. Plastic has become synonymous with cheap and worthless, when in fact those chains of hydrocarbons ought to be regarded as among the most valuable substances on the planet. If we understood plastic’s true worth, we would stop wasting it on trivial throwaways and take better advantage of what this versatile material can do for us.
In a world of nearly seven billion souls and counting, we are not going to feed, clothe and house ourselves solely from wood, ore and stone; we need plastics. And in an era when we’re concerned about our carbon footprint, we can appreciate that lightweight plastics take less energy to produce and transport than many other materials.
Yet we can’t hope to achieve plastic’s promise for the 21st century if we stick with wasteful 20th century habits of plastic production and consumption. We have the technology to make better and safer plastics-forged from renewable sources, rather than finite fossil fuels, using chemicals that inflict minimal or no harm on the planet and our health.
1. From the results of banning plastic bags, we learn that ______.
2. What do we know about the single-use plastic products from the third paragraph?
3. The author believes that people would stop wasting plastic if they¬ ______.
4. Lightweight plastics enjoy great advantage over other materials in that that they are ______.
5. What’s the author’s attitude towards the future of plastic?
