‘It is one world. And it’s in our care. For the first time in the history of humanity, for the first time in 500 million years, one species has the future in the palm of its hands’-
David Attenborough, noted British broadcaster and biologist
Opening note
Residents in my area turn up in the streets with their waste buckets containing meticulously segregated wet and dry home waste so as to deposit it in the garbage collection vehicle that appear regularly in the early morning since last ten years or so. Door-to-door collection of domestic garbage has become order of the day in most of all the urban areas for which a solid waste management fee is levied on the residents. Environmental consciousness hasn’t however penetrated deep into the society in the entire spectrum of solid waste management system albeit the existence of legal framework for the same in India.
As an avid traveller, I am pained to notice the mounts of urban domestic waste along the highways that unfailingly mark the arrival of or departure from a city. I used to wonder as to why the urban area managers are not able to contain this growing menace of environmental degradation that is seen as one of the symbols of urban progress. To my mind, modernity in urban lifestyles brought us to this distressing situation. More than any other ills waste handling and management- both air, water and solid wastes- have emerged as an outstanding challenge before the urban administrators. The unsightly appearance of garbage dumps in the outskirts of cities and towns besides assaulting our aesthetic senses pose innumerable health risks to the very human society that generates them. While many components account for the domestic solid waste, they get grouped into either degradable or non degradable, recyclable or non recyclable forms. In the current mode of faster and consumerist urban lifestyle, use of a vast array of goods made of plastic has accelerated and so also its discard rate. Therefore, plastic constitutes one of the chief components of urban domestic wastes. That the portion of plastic wastes in the domestic refuse grew from 4 percent at the turn of the century to over 8 percent in the end of last decade explains the situation. In the current post and in a few forthcoming episodes, I intend to present the readers about the growing threats from plastic wastes to human environment and the ways how the humanity is gearing up to the challenges connected with the plastic waste management.
History of Plastic invention
A brief insight into the introduction of plastic in human society is considered relevant. What is plastic, the ubiquitous substance that has become inseparable in our lives? The word ‘plastic’ originated from the Greek verb ‘plassein’, which means ‘to mould or shape’. True to its meaning, plastics have the capacity to be easily shaped thanks to their structure, those long molecules made of repeating units of smaller molecules that are chemically bound together. In fact, every living organism in nature contains polymers, these molecular chains. While it is cellulose that makes up the cell walls in plants, keratin, a mixed carbon-nitrogen polymer constitutes the animal horn. During the period in human civilisation before the invention of synthetic plastic, clays, glass and rubber were the only substances that were possibly moulded and shaped.
Accidental discovery of a natural polymer in 1846 through a chemical reaction between cotton, nitric and sulphuric acid gave ‘nitrocellulose’. This was put to military use in place of gun powder. It was cellulose that provided the raw material for the first great breakthrough in modern plastics - the material ‘Parkesine’, modestly named by its British inventor Alexander Parkes, who put the objects like the printers' moulds, cutlery handles, buttons, and combs on display at the 1862 international exhibition in London .About a decade later, nitrocellulose, reacted with camphor led to the invention of another product named ‘celluloid’ by John Wesley Hyatt (1869) that found its application in photographic film, billiard balls, dental plates and Ping-Pong balls. Till that time, ivory accounted for most of the billiard balls. Popularity of ‘celluloid polymer’ in filming most movies until digital production took over, rightly gave the name ‘celluloid world’ to the filmdom.
From wood to ivory to plastic - journey of billiard balls
Most of us might have seen the billiard balls- those perfectly round, solid, weighty and lustrous balls of different hues- sitting pretty on the rectangular billiards/snooker table, occupying the corporate lounges, club houses and army/officers’ messes. Wondering as to what material makes those sturdy rounds that could withstand up to approximately 5 tons of pressure. Certain forms of thermoset plastic like the phenolic resin, polyester or clear acrylic go to shape today’s billiard balls. It will be of interest to know that modernity transformed the material input to make these balls through centuries of man’s indulgence in billiards. From the time when wooden, clay and ox bone balls occupied the billiard tables, the game table that decorated every Estate and every mansion of upper-crust society in the United States and Europe in the mid-1800s came to be stocked with the best, high-end billiard balls made of ivory, sourced from elephants. Besides billiard balls, ivory at that time was used in buttonhooks to boxes, piano keys to combs, book holders to carom strikers. Market leader Burroughes & Watt of that period at one time held a stock of 20,000 ivory billiard balls, the largest ever in the world, valued at 15000 pound shillings. The average number of balls cut from the tusks of an elephant was 10 (five from each tusk) and the above stock represented the produce from an enormous number of 2,000 elephants. With an average sale of 950 billiard balls per month, this single company alone was claiming an annual toll of 1,140 elephants. “The situation became most dire in Ceylon, where, from the northern part of the island”, the New York Times in 1867 reported , "upon the reward of a few shillings per head being offered by the authorities, 3,500 pachyderms were dispatched in less than three years by the natives". Sparking fears of shortage, the Times hoped that ‘an adequate substitute may be found’.3
Thereafter, sorel cement, marketed as an artificial ivory (1867) and nitro cellulose, commercially branded as celluloid (1869), a natural whitish plastic polymer created from cotton cellulose went into the making of billiard balls. Celluloid balls however, lacked the bounce, resilience but at the same time were volatile. The industry experimented with various other synthetic materials for billiard balls such as Bakelite, Crystallite and other plastic compounds. The exacting requirements with strong resistance to cracking and chipping are met today by casting the billiard balls with various plastic compounds like phenolic resin, polyester or clear acrylic.
Bakelite- The first versatile version of plastic
First ever truly synthetic polymer, Bakelite was invented by Leo Baekeland in 1909 as a result of the reaction between phenol, an acid derived from coal tar and formaldehyde. Marketed as ‘a material of thousand uses’, Bakelite substituted shellac, a sticky excretion from lac beetle in making combs, handles, radios, phones, auto parts and even jewellery.The creation of Bakelite marked a definitive shift in the development of new plastics. From then on, scientists stopped looking for materials that could emulate nature; rather, they sought ‘to rearrange nature in new and imaginative ways’. Baekeland’s work opened the floodgates to a torrent of now-familiar synthetic plastics from the laboratories around the world- polystyrene (PS) in 1929, polyester in 1930, polyvinylchloride (PVC) and polythene in 1933, nylon in 1935, polyethylene terephthalate (PET) in 1940.
It would be seen that the family of the new plastics, discovered in the 1920s and 1930s were monopolized by the military over the course of World War II. Plastics were put into very many significant services and used for mortar fuses, parachutes, aircraft components, antenna housing, enclosures for gun turrets, helmet liners, and in countless other applications. Production of plastics nearly quadrupled during the war3, from 213 million pounds in 1939 to 818 million pounds in 1945.
Plastic emerging as omnipresent and omnipotent
Why plastic had become the most popular consumer component worldwide in the twentieth century was because it freed humanity from the confines of the natural world, from the material constraints and limited supplies that had long bounded human activity. That new elasticity unfixed social boundaries as well. The arrival of these malleable and versatile materials gave producers the ability to create a treasure trove of new products, while expanding opportunities for people of even modest modes of living to become aggressive consumers. Plastics held out the promise of a new material and cultural democracy.
In the post–World War II scenario, lab-synthesized plastics have virtually defined the way of life and people started seeing plastics as the harbinger of a new era of abundance. For the public, who were too weary of scarcity with most other materials like steel, glass, wood, rubber etc., plastic polymers threw an exciting and glittering promise of plenty.
Depending on how it's processed, the plastic could be used to wrap a sandwich or tether an astronaut during a walk in deep space. The first National Plastics Exposition in New York held just months after the II World War showcased the new products, made possible by the plastics that had proven themselves in the War. So much so, the Chairman of the expo claimed ‘Nothing can stop plastics’. The following decades of the 20th century proved him right in that the vast array of plastic products grew in leaps and bounds. Man in the fag-end of twentieth century had begun to feel that he is a ‘Plastic man’, who rightfully belongs to the ‘Plastic Age’. Remember the score of plastic cards that sit pretty in our wallet that has come to stay as part and parcel of our lives.
Many faces of Plastic
When you think of plastic, what springs to our mind? Inexpensive toys? Packaging of goods and consumer durables? Throw away plastic carry bags? Think of any item that is part of the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) segment, plastic shows its face in one form or other. Plastic products, as inexpensive and easy to handle alternatives challenged and won traditional materials and for instance, taking the place of steel in cars, of paper and glass in packaging, wood in furniture and so on.
India joined the global nations in their race for plastic much later, almost three decades behind the developed countries. Manufacture of commercial polymers in India commenced as below: Polystyrene (PS) in 1957, Light Density Poly Ethylene (HDPE) in1959, Poly Vinyl Chloride (PVC) in1961, High Density Poly Ethylene (HDPE) in1968 and Polypropylene (PP) in1978. In the last fifty years or so, different forms of plastics have saturated our world and changed the way we live. The diverse utility of plastic in every day human life and the consequent potential market demand for plastic motivated entrepreneurs in the country to acquire technical expertise, achieve high quality of standards and build huge capacities in various facets of the booming plastic industry. Plastic processers began to build capacities for both the domestic and overseas market. Today, Indian plastic processing sector comprises of over 30,000 units involved in producing a myriad items for a plethora of applications.
Since its introduction, plastics continue to hold a rein in our society and almost all articles of our daily use are either plastic or has plastic component in them. Today, plastics find wider application in every sector of human enterprise, be it agriculture, packaging, electronic, building, house ware, transportation etc2.
Plastics aren’t simply one material made the same way every time. Though we come across thousands of different plastics, each with its own composition and characteristics, they are broadly broken into certain types or categories. Such categories are based the plastic polymer and resin identification codes found on each for the sake of recycling and based on their virgin and recycled end uses. Universally, plastics fall into one of the seven categories. They are PET, HDPE, PVC, LDPE, PP, PS and Miscellaneous. Plastic recycling codes come from the Society of the Plastics Industry, Inc. (SPI) that introduced its resin identification coding system in 1988.
Plastic production registered logarithmic increase over the last half a century and the global production stood at 359 million metric tonnes in 2018. China accounted for more than one fourth of global plastic production. In the corresponding year, India produced 15,524 metric tonnes of virgin plastic polymers of different kinds2. It has been recorded that growth rate of the Indian plastics industry is one of the highest in the world, with plastics consumption from 2017 to 2022 likely to grow at 10.4 per cent per annum, nearly half of which is single use plastic3. With the growing middle class, per capita consumption of plastics stands at 11 kg per annum in India, as against 38 in China and 109 in the United States2. Global per capita consumption stands at 28 kg.
It is revealed from a 2018 report of the PlastIndia Foundation that Poly Ethylene (PE) and Poly Propylene (PP) polymers that take the shape of much of our quickly discarded plastic utility items account for 58 per cent of total plastic polymer consumption in India.
........... To be continued
Bibliography
1.Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, Government of India, 2019. Plastic Waste Management- Issues, Solutions and Case Studies. New Delhi March 2019.
2. Rashmi Shrivastav, 2019. India’s plastic waste situation was not created today. Down to Earth. October 2019
3. Susan Freinkel, 2011. Cheap plastic has unleashed a flood of consumer goods. Excerpts from Plastic: A Toxic Love Story
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