Better to corrupt plastics than the environment

Abstract

Plastics have entered the everyday life of humans everywhere and help solve innumerable problems, yet they are a curse on the environment. They remain in the streets and parks and beaches, wherever humans do not dispose of waste properly. This is not an easy exercise for many societies, since it requires an organized and costly system of waste collection, reuse or appropriate incineration. Plastic objects and microplastics are littering the soil and the water, suffocating and poisoning marine life. Europe is the second largest plastics producer in the world, after China, and out of the 27 million tonnes of plastic waste produced each year in Europe, only a third is recycled. Every year, 150 000–500 000 tonnes of macroplastics and 70 000–130 000 tonnes of microplastics are dumped into the seas around Europe. The majority of these plastics enter the Mediterranean Sea, posing a major threat to marine life. Large plastic pieces injure, suffocate and often kill marine animals, including protected and endangered species, such as sea turtles. The microplastics, smaller and more insidious fragments, have reached record levels in the Mediterranean Sea: their concentration is almost four times higher than in the “plastic island” found in the North Pacific Ocean. Plastic debris in the marine environment contains organic contaminants, of which 78 percent are toxic. By entering the food chain, these fragments threaten an increasing number of animal species as well as human health (Alessi and Di Carlo, 2018). There are three defence strategies, and they are all necessary: