Production of safer plastics thanks to Environmental Risk Assessment

AUTHOR : Ricardo Beiras, Professor in Ecology, University of Vigo (Galicia, Spain)
Despite their multitude of useful applications, plastics are highly criticised. But what are the risks associated with their end-of-life? For Dr. Beiras, plastics are probably the most innocuous synthetic materials mankind has ever produced. The risk would not come from plastic resins but rather, from chemical additives potential leaching. He shares with Plasticulture Magazine readers the promising ecotoxicity protocols developed though the LABPLAST project, which will help industry manufacture chemically safer plastic items.
Better manage used plastics to avoid pollution
By mid-XXth century, advances in organic chemistry made it possible to produce a synthetic cheap and durable material. This material is plastic: light, waterproof, inexpensive and adaptable to any size or shape. Plastics replaced natural materials in most commodities, from winter jerseys to Spanish guitar strings. So, what can go wrong with them?
As environmentalists brought into focus, they appear where they should not: floating on the sea drifting thousands of miles away from their starting point or spoiling a nice sandy beach after a storm. Sunlight and leaching plasticizer turn plastic brittle, and if submitted to mechanical stress a bottle will rather quickly break down into increasingly small pieces. In 2004, Richard C. Thompson and colleagues found them in marine plankton and sediment samples – inaugurating a strange association between plastic and the sea -, which persists nowadays, despite the land-based origin of all plastic materials. If plastic litter becomes abundant in the environment, fauna will ingest it or get entangled as in a deadly trap. In my view, and I am aware how unpopular this statement is nowadays, this is a minor problem which could be efficiently contained by reducing consumption, promoting durable commodities and dealing correctly with solid waste, which of course includes not exporting garbage to developing countries. No one expects to find guitar strings on a beach, so it is not the material but its mismanagement that causes plastic pollution.
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