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Fantastic plastic, smart human
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Our world is full of a variety of plastic. Looking at your home, you will find plastic lids, plastic bottles, plastic bags, plastic wrappers ... Looking around your school, you will find plastic pens, plastic running track, plastic scissors, plastic lunch boxes ... Why do people love plastic so much? Because it has plenty of advantages: It protects the contents and makes them easier to carry; it’s waterproof, flexible and can be clear or colored; it weights very little but could be super strong; it is cheap and easy to make as well.
About 150 years ago, a famous chemist Mr Baekeland made an incredible discovery but he never predicted that it would make such a big trouble to our environment — plastic is not able to be biodegraded like natural things! A plastic bag will last for more than 600 years before it rots. It’s likely to be around still when your great-great-great grandchildren are born.
So shall we stop using plastic? Surely not! What we need to do is: Use it smartly. I have three ideas.
First, we have to say No to single-use plastic like straws, balloons, plastic wrappers etc. It doesn’t make sense that we use them for only a few minutes but they will stay in nature for hundreds of years.
Second, we should recycle plastic as much as we can. Today, less than 10 percent of plastic is recycled. That means more than 90 percent of plastic produced still stays in the nature. One way to increase recycle is trash reclassification. In Shanghai, we have one recycle trash bin to collect all the recyclable trash. However, it is far from enough. I suggest that we should have different recycle trash bins for different kinds of plastic: one for drinking bottles, one for plastic bags and takeaway containers, one for plastic that could be used for many times and one for clothes made from nylon. Since each category of plastic requires being collected and melted separately, better sorting helps more efficient recycling.
Third, we can try to use other materials to make plastic. But why not use paper or metal instead? Actually in order to produce paper or metal, it will consume a large quantity of woods or energy, which are harmful to environment, too.
My idea is to invent some plant-based plastic made from potato starch, banana skin or algae. So if you don’t want to use it any more, you just throw it on the earth and it will be biodegraded soon.
Scientists are working on special bugs that might help plastic rot more quickly. By then, plastic pollution may be no longer a headache for human. Yet, before such bugs are successfully created, we still need to be careful and use the fantastic plastic smartly.
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