No Single-use Plastic Challenge Part1
Plastic pollution is one of the most important problems for our planet. Microplastics nowadays can be found not only in our ocean but also found in drinking water and even in food, not to mention the viral video of the sea turtle with straw.
https://youtu.be/4wH878t78bw
The plastic waste problem becomes more and more serious and it is tempting us to wonder what can we do now? How can we stop all of this mess?
In our PSSD course, Design Innovation, we need to challenge something in this two week. I set no single-use plastic as my challenge. Before starting to talk about my challenge, maybe it would be better to define single-use plastic, understand the flow of recycling in different country and also introduce the concept of carbon footprint first.
What is single-use plastic?
According to the plasticfree challenge website
Single-use plastics, or disposable plastics, are used only once before they are thrown away or recycled. These items are things like plastic bags, straws, coffee stirrers, soda and water bottles and most food packaging.
As the pictures shown above, most of the food in supermarket are with single-use plastic package. The plastic used in food packaging mostly are PET, PP, HDPE and LDPE, since these material are stable and non-toxic under certain temperature.
Plastic Recycle
According to European Union’s strategy for plastic waste, circular economy is set as the main solution to solve plastic problem.
To reach the goal of circular economy, recycle is important. I interviewed with a engineer in Do Fon recycle company, a recycle company in Taiwan, for information about recycling, he gave me an important tip.
“The more pure the material is, the more easy it can be recycled”
Let’s take water bottles as an example.
Plastic water bottle is mostly made by PET, which the material can extend very well and easy to recycle and also now we already have the mature technology to produce clothes with recycled PET. However, from plastic waste to recycled materials is the hardest part in this circular economy. To get the high quality recycled materials, we need to ask for the purity of the plastic waste.
Mostly the plastic water bottle have three parts, the cap, the body and the label. The cap is mostly made by PP or HDPE while the label is made by PVC or PP. The difference of these material increase the difficulty of the recycling process. That means, it will be better to divide the label and the cap first before we throw the bottle into the recycling bins.
Even the color of the bottle can decrease the quality of recycling, since the pigment can effect the color of the recycled materials and extensibility. That is why the color of recycle materials is always a little dirty.
To conclude that, we can say to divide different materials to raise the quality is the hardest part of recycling. When we designers design something, to think about how to recycle the material is very important. When the quality of recycled materials is good enough and maybe affordable enough to be involved into the mass production process, the circular economy can be completed.
Carbon Footprint
How to measure how green a product is?I think carbon footprint can be one of the standards.
Carbon footprint means how much carbon is produced in the life of the product, which means from production, transportation, use to recycling.
To be more specific, we can ask
- how much energy is used to make the product during manufacturing?
- how durable is the product? (ie how many times can it be reused?)
- how easy is it to recycle?
- how quickly does it decompose if thrown away?*
*These questions are from an article below.
Maybe you already saw the article about the war between plastic totes, paper bags and cotton bags. In the article, the plastic totes might be greener if we only see the resources these bags have taken. I think the article is clear enough for the concept of carbon footprint, so let’s move on To the next part.
It doesn’t take so much resources to produce plastic, and compared to other materials, it is easier to recycle and reduce plastic. But why we still think plastic is an evil material? Just because it can not decompose naturally? I will say that it is not plastic’s fault. It is human’s.
Human’s behavior is the main reason to cause all the pollution. In some third world or developing countries, it is too difficult and expensive to deal with the garbage, people tend to pour the garbage into the river and ocean to save money and work. Also there are some countries that bury garbage under the ground, but when the coastal erosion occurs, some garbage flows into the ocean. There are too many incomplete policies for plastic waste and there are not enough people that have awareness on the issue. Even now people still produce plastic products with new plastic material but not recycled one.
If we want to solve the problem of plastic pollution, we need to think about not only reducing the production of plastic but also how can we bring the plastic back into the recycling process.
OK, next diary I will talk about my no single-use plastic challenge.
