Tom Udall, D-N.M., holding up a Visa card, said when announcing legislation meant to reduce plastic pollution this past February. “This credit card here, this is how much plastic you are consuming every week,” Sen. Reliable research now shows that tiny bits of plastic are in our food, drinking water, the air we breathe, and, yes, inside our bodies. It’s not just the photos of whales, albatrosses, and sea turtles washing ashore, stomachs clogged with the stuff, or the stories about swirling ocean vortexes collecting litter from around the globe-although these are sobering.
#PEOPLE CHEWING ON PLASTIC HOW TO#
(Find out how to use less plastic and see the Plastic Through the Ages timeline, below.)Īnd yet there’s growing concern. Some of it may last for hundreds of years, and when it does break down, it can become small particles of plastic-microplastics-that spread farther across the planet, entering our water and food supply. The vast majority of that plastic eventually ends up piled up around the planet. In 2018, manufacturers created almost 400 million tons of new plastic, and production is expected to almost quadruple by 2050. In fact, the world has produced more than 10 billion tons of the stuff, mostly since the 1950s, and we just keep making more. And-more than anywhere else-plastic is in our packaging, encasing everything from laundry detergent to prescription pills, from the food we eat to the beverages we drink.
It had that right: Today, beyond the plates we eat from, the straws we drink through, the furniture we sit on, and the toys our kids play with, there is plastic in the clothes we wear, in the cars we drive, even in the lifesaving medical equipment in our hospitals. The first company to ever sell fully synthetic plastic-the Bakelite Corp., established in 1922-advertised it as “The Material of a Thousand Uses.”
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