It is hardly a hundred years since chemists learnt to make long molecules called polymers and plastics in the lab. Polymers have since been hailed on one hand as the greatest boon to mankind for their manifold uses, and the greatest bane - thanks to the way that they have cluttered the environment. The most common synthetic polymer or plastic used in everyday life is polyethylene terephthalate or PET (also known as Terylene or Dacron). An estimated 311 million tonnes of plastics are produced every year (and 50 million tons of PET alone). Unfortunately many of them, such as PET, are not degraded, digested or broken down like naturally occurring polymers (such as proteins, carbohydrates and fats). We use plastic in everyday life, use and discard them, hardly recycling them (to the extent we actually can), and as a result plastics have cluttered the earth and its oceans. J.R. Jambeck and others have estimated that as much as 5 trillion pieces of plastic have reached and are found in ocean beds across the globe (Science, 13 February 2015). That is anywhere between 5 to 13 million tonnes of them, lying and affecting the health of ocean life (and an area of about 1.4 million square kilometers, or the area of Northern India). There is no clear estimate of how much plastic is fouling the land mass of the earth, surely it has to be an equal amount.........................Read more

Source: The Hindu