Global Commons by Pillai Mohanan Bhaskaran; Dore Geetha Ganapathy;

Author:Pillai, Mohanan Bhaskaran; Dore, Geetha Ganapathy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Published: 2020-06-23T13:09:21+00:00

Part III

Environmental Hazards

Chapter 10

The Massive Problem of Microplastics in the Global Commons

An Overview

Kaushik Dowarah and Suja P. Devipriya

Introduction

Today we cannot imagine a world without plastics. Due to its various properties, plastics dominate every sphere of human lives. Although the first synthetic plastic like Bakelite was invented in the early 20th century, its use was limited largely to the military up to World War II. Large-scale production began only in the 1950s (Geyer, Jambeck, and Law 2017). Plastic is inexpensive, lightweight, strong, durable, corrosion-resistant and have high thermal and electrical insulation properties. These factors enabled a wide range of applications and benefits, which ranged from medical use, technological advances, energy savings and numerous other social benefits. Naturally, this created a lot of enthusiasm in the early days of its mass production. But in those early days, the problems pertaining to waste management and debris could not be anticipated (Thompson et al. 2009).

Plastic began to be reported as a potential contaminant in the 1970s. Besides, there was no direct research in the field until the 1990s (Horton et al. 2016).

The quantum of plastic waste generated between the 1950s and the 1970s was relatively small, and therefore manageable. However, this waste more than tripled in two decades between the 1970s and the 1990s. Plastic waste produced in the first decade of the 2000s exceeded what was produced in the previous 40 years. Today we generate plastic waste of 300 million tonnes every year. Incidentally, 300 million tonnes is approximately the weight of the entire human population. More than 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic have been produced since the 1950s, about 60 per cent of which had ended up in the natural environment as waste and pollutants. An estimated 8 million tonnes of plastic end up in the oceans every year (UNEP 2018).

After production, plastic do not degrade naturally in the environment. Plastic that is now labelled ‘biodegradable’ will degrade only if subjected to a prolonged temperature of 50˚C. Hence it is not sufficient as a solution for plastic waste management (Su et al. 2016). Plastic never entirely disappear. They merely fragment into ever-smaller particles over time through various processes. These processes could be mechanical forces acting on the larger pieces of plastic, thermo-oxidation, photolysis, thermo-degradation and/or other biological processes (Abidli et al. 2017). Hence, plastic produced decades ago is still present in tiny sizes somewhere in the environment, and these tiny pieces of plastic have now emerged as a potential hazard that we call ‘microplastics’.

Microplastics are plastic particles that are smaller than the size of 5 mm. Although this size denomination of microplastic is disputed by some scholars, 5 mm is now generally accepted as the threshold for determining microplastic particles. As the fragmentation of larger plastic debris continues, the quantity of microplastics is only increasing with every passing day in the environment. The tiny size of microplastics makes it very difficult to manage, and they are transported very easily throughout the environment. This gives microplastics the potential to dominate any given system.

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