In a scene from the iconic 1967 movie The Graduate, an older man offers career advice to an aimless new college graduate played by Dustin Hoffman: "One word: Plastics. There's a great future in plastics."
Perhaps director Mike Nichols or the scriptwriters were prescient, but by the 1970s the use of plastic began to increase exponentially, and plastic waste had tripled by the 1990s. In the early 2000s, the amount of plastic waste generated by humanity rose more in a single decade than it had over the previous 40 years, according to the UN Environment Program.
Today, plastic pollution is a global crisis, affecting our health and environment. Plastic is in our drinking water, our food supply, the air, soil, the oceans and inside our bodies. We now produce 430 million tons of plastic each year, two thirds of which becomes waste. Most plastic is made from fossil fuels, a factor in climate change, and in 2019 plastics generated 1.8 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, 3.4 % of the global total.
Once disposed of, plastic waste is exposed to biological, chemical and environmental elements, and will break down into microplastics and nanoplastics, which are so small they infiltrate our bodies and cells. Nanoplastics are so tiny that they had previously escaped detection. Only recently, results of a new study published in January 2024 reported a detection technique that can quickly identify the size and composition of miniscule particulates. The result of this first study: a liter of bottled water contains an average of 240,000 particulates, a quanitity much higher than previously reported. Other recent studies have found microplastics in the human brain, and in breast milk.
While the health impacts of plastic in humans is still a somewhat new research area, scientific studies so far indicate that plastic causes diseases, disability and premature death at every stage of its very long life cycle. (Plastic waste can take up to 500 years to decompose, and even then, it never fully disappears; it just gets smaller and smaller.
Scientifically proven health effects include causing cancer or changing hormone activity, which can lead to reproductive, growth, and cognitive impairment. Adverse effects of plastics on children and fetuses include increased risks of prematurity, stillbirth, birth defects of the reproductive organs, neurodevelopmental impairment, impaired lung growth, and childhood cancer.
So yes, plastics are a scourge, but the issue is more complicated; there are positive aspects to their use in society.
The reasons for the ubiquity of plastic in modern society are obvious. It is versatile, flexible, and can be molded into any shape. It is cost effective, lightweight, durable, watertight, and hygienically preserves food and medical supplies.
Indeed, even with the dire health risks ascribed to plastic, the World Health Organization acknowledged this dichotomy in its discussion of the topic, saying, "Plastics have an important role in health care and are used in packaging, personal protective equipment, syringes, and intravenous administration products to name a few." WHO adds that plastics are "essential to ensure affordable access to essential medicines and medical devices."
Perhaps the best example of the trajectory of plastic use over the past half century is the Monobloc, the ubiquitous chair considered the world's best-selling piece of furniture with a billion in circulation. The simple plastic chair is found, literally, everywhere there is a need for inexpensive seating, from cafes in Asia to schoolrooms in Africa to suburban lawns in Europe and urban roof terraces in New York.
It is unclear who invented it, but a French engineer, Henry Massonnet, claims his 1972 model, "Fauteuil 300" was the original. The design was never patented, so variations have been produced around the world ever since.
Named for its manufacturing process as a single piece of plastic injection-molded into a form and finished in 55 seconds, the Monobloc is the archetypal mass-market consumer product, lightweight, widely available and typically costing around 10 EUR. In the West, the chairs are reviled, considered environmentally unsound eyesores.
That was the way Hamburg-based filmmaker Hauke Wendler saw it when he set out to investigate the chair's astounding popularity around the word, culminating in the 2021 release of his documentary "Monobloc." He found that the chairs are perceived quite differently in developing countries.
In India, the Monobloc literally lifted people off the floor; the lower-middle class had never before been able to afford furniture. Now, they sat on chairs and dined on plastic tables of similar quality. In the film, a Monobloc distributor in India declares that a "whole evolution of society has happened with plastic chairs."
The American nonprofit Free Wheelchair Mission has adapted Monoblocs as wheelchairs by attaching a metal frame with wheels. In Uganda, over one million of the devices have been distributed to people who could not afford traditional wheelchairs, allowing them to lead more independent lives. The film depicts a woman who had lost the use of her legs being fitted for one; until then, she could only crawl on the ground and had to be carried by family members to go anywhere.
To people in Brazil who pick up recyclable items to exchange for cash, the Monobloc is prized, as it brings a high price. Many people there rely on it to make a living.
Throughout the documentary, Wendler interspersed German citizens talking about the Monobloc; all had negative views: they are ugly, of poor quality, and bad for the environment. "They belong to the range of disposable items that shouldn't be part of our culture or our civilization," said one. "I thought they'd have been confined to history by now. They can't be recycled," said another.
The filmmaker posits: "Is this true? Can plastic chairs really not be recycled?" Then the action cuts to a recycling plant in Brazil, where the plastic is washed, ground down, washed again, dried, then fed into a machine that turns it into granulate. The granulate is sold to Industria Brasileira de Artefatos Plasticos, a company that has been working with recyclable material for 50 years, to be made into new plastic chairs.
"The reason why we started [recycling] back then was that Brazil had a shortage of raw materials," says Ary Jaime De Albuquerque, the company's founder, adding that he works with recyclable plastic out of conviction. "I believe we should all recycle as much as possible. Recycling is the only way forward for humanity."
After traveling the world making the film, documentarian Wendler acknowledged that we in the West are guilty of not recycling the chairs, which are made of polypropylene. However, plastic cannot be recycled infinitely; it degrades with each recycling, and even when mixed with virgin plastic, eventually becomes waste anyway. So really, all plastic produced ends up as waste.
While no widely available alternatives to plastic in furniture manufacturing seem to be immediately on the horizon, researchers are developing promising new materials.
The plastic situation is an emergency, and in an unprecedented move, in 2022 all UN member states agreed on a resolution to create a legally binding agreement by 2024 to end plastic pollution. This is a very ambitious time span, reflecting the urgency to act. The Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee scheduled five meetings to hammer out the agreement, with the final one taking place in November 2024 in Busan, South Korea. They were unable to arrive at an agreement at that meeting, and negotiations will continue.
What remains, then, for each of us to handle plastic responsibly and with care, and to avoid it wherever possible.
