Guest Blog:The Institution of Plastic: We need a cultural reformation, not just clean-up
This Blog is from the Plastic Pollution Coalition to coincide with the UN Oceans Conference
Ocean, Culture, Environment
We were heartened to see Margaret Atwood’s column in The
Guardian, detailing the ever-increasing perils we are facing from our
worldwide dependence on single-use plastic. We are polluting our own food
supply by dumping plastics into the environment at an alarming rate.
We are damaging our own health and our children’s
development by taking into our bodies the chemicals leaching from single-use
plastic packaging of our food and drinks. Ms. Atwood advocates for reformation
of the somewhat nebulous “institution” of plastics, with which we consummately
agree: the reverence we’ve built toward this expensive, destructive material
might very well be our undoing as a global society.
We undoubtedly must find a way to collect, clean, and
recycle the plastics we’ve already made and dumped worldwide. But plastics are
only one cog in a larger system, a single-use culture reliant on the
petrochemical and forest industries for its feed supply.
But the solution to this scourge is not simply the
small-scale cleanup projects or non-plastic replacements cited by Ms. Atwood.
We undoubtedly must find a way to collect, clean, and recycle the plastics
we’ve already made and dumped worldwide. But plastics are only one cog in a
larger system, a single-use culture reliant on the petrochemical and forest
industries for its feed supply.
In the 1950s, when the world was first moving beyond
Bakelite and into the cult of plastic, advertisements encouraged people to
change their whole way of life. Gone were the days of wartime rations and
careful reuse of all household materials. Instead, Life Magazine encouraged
people to embrace “Throwaway Living.” No more housewives washing dishes for
minutes on end after meals! No longer did you have to worry about packing up
your picnic set and cleaning it all once you got home! Like Betty Draper in Mad
Men, you could just toss it off the blanket and forget about it. Like many religions,
plastics started with a miracle: the miracle of time saved.
A man, woman and child toss "disposable" items into the air, 1955.
Peter Stackpole—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
Rarely is a new creed embraced as
quickly or as thoroughly. In just two generations, few people can now get
through even one day without offering a sacrifice to the plastic gods. But
little do we realize that the sacrifice is our own health, and the gods are not
mythical beings: they’re petrochemical and plastics industry CEOs, profiting
off our ready acceptance of the single-use dogma.
Systemic solutions for this systemic problem are at hand.
Not only do we need to clean up the plastic pollution that already exists in
our landfills and oceans; we must also form a new kind of reverence. The
reformation that Ms. Atwood so earnestly calls for must redefine our concept of
convenience. We must work with governments, businesses, and institutions to
create systems for reuse and redesign, to change policy and practice to protect
our own health and our communities, away from single-use.
Until we reform our society’s devotion to worshipping at
the altar of convenience above all else, we risk continuing to be overwhelmed
by the onslaught of garbage.
As part of a growing global movement, communities
across the world are acting collectively to demand better systems and to pass
laws limiting single-use plastic and other materials. The urgent work of
Plastic Pollution Coalition and our partners in this movement is to uplift
these local efforts and to scale them, to remove the individual consumer burden
of this exponential global problem. What we need to stop plastic pollution is
cultural reformation, not just clean up. We need a different kind of miracle.
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