In our life time, plastics have become an integral part of our daily lives. Unique nature of plastics, with its light weight, durability, flexibility, cushioning and barrier properties allow plastic packaging to serve humankind more efficiently while helping to reduce a variety of environmental impacts and carbon footprint. We need to develop new ways and means to use plastics waste and build a more circular economy by using our plastics resources more efficiently, capturing and repurposing more post-use packaging, advancing recycling.
Myths about plastics in packaging
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Plastics is bad for packaging
Plastic is the great Satan of garbage, gaudy, cheap, and a convenient scapegoat, but it is little amazing to know, that paper is the largest component of the excavated landfills’ contents at approximately 40%. Newspapers alone accounted between 10-15%. Plastics on the other hand, amounted to approximately 20% to entire garbage and when compacted in typical landfill condition, it reduced to around 16%.
As we all are aware that number of articles made from plastics has been increasing over a period of time, but due to down-gauzing and light weighting, the amount of plastics used in packaging, almost all the products has gone down substantially. One may like to make a note, that once plastic gets lighter and thinner, it also becomes more easily crushable.
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Lot of degradation takes place in landfills
Most of the people try to defend paper because it biodegrades in landfills easily while plastics take up space ‘until the end of time’. As per the findings ‘bio-logically and chemically’, a landfill is much more static than we commonly suppose. For some kinds of organic garbage, bio-degradation goes on for some time and then slows down and virtually it goes to a standstill. This may be interesting to know, that in some cases bio-degradation does not even start taking place at all.
Most organic material excavated remained identifiable. These include carrot tips, whole hot dogs and onion pairings, which are several decades old. Several decades old newspapers have also been found. Normal landfill conditions in which the landfill is kept relatively dry, the only types of garbage that truly decompose are certain kinds of food and yard waste. Several well designed and well managed landfills are not vast composters, rather, they are vast mummifiers.
