MODERN LIFE IS RUBBISH
I was born in 1965, the year the plastic bag was invented.
During my childhood, in a boom city in central India, I remember plastic bags were still relatively rare. Only the more expensive shops gave them out and my mother treasured hers, using and reusing them, admiring their strength and how easy they were to rinse out.
In the intervening years, time has sped up for the plastic bag, imparting something so durable with an astonishing ephemerality. It’s estimated that the average time for which they are used is now just 15 minutes, after which they will take up to 1,000 years to break down. Two million are distributed per minute worldwide.
Half of all the plastic items produced each year are single-use. There is no way we can say we consume them – as in using them up – rather we are creatures of their dispersal and disposal, so that the plastics industry can churn out yet more. Plastics are inextricably intertwined with fossil fuel companies: all major plastics producers either own or are owned by oil and gas companies, and accounted for six per cent of global oil consumption in 2014. These are industries that have shown a supernatural resistance to curbing their environmentally destructive activities.
Our glut of plastic – every single bit of it ever made is still with us apart from the minor portion that has been burned – has come to symbolize a throwaway world. The amount of plastic produced in a year is roughly the entire weight of the human beings living upon it.
The oceanic Great Pacific Garbage Patch of floating plastic is three times the size of France. Coca-Cola alone sends out 120 billion plastic bottles each year – enough to circle our planet 700 times. We discard this stuff, often without a second thought, but also because there is so much of
