Plastic: Boon to Bane

Plastic production increased rapidly post 1950s and transformed our lives forever. Without the advent of plastic the modern age that we live in today wouldn’t have been the same.

Plastic is light weight, cheap, durable, strong, long shelf life, unbreakable, easy to transport & can store anything & everything. Plastics revolutionized medicine with life-saving devices, made space travel possible, lightened cars and jets—saving fuel and pollution—and saved lives with helmets, incubators, and equipment for clean drinking water.

The conveniences plastics offer, however, led to a throw-away culture that revealed the material’s dark side. Non Degradability!

Today, single-use plastics account for 50 percent of the plastic waste produced every year. Many of these products, such as plastic bags & bottles, disposable cutlery, packaging material and food wrappers, have a lifespan of mere minutes to hours, yet they may persist in the environment for hundreds of years.

Acres of landfills, miles of oceanic garbage patches, microplastics in the food chain, and greenhouse gases released by plastic dumpyards; plastic pollution has reached grave levels.

Some facts

Every year, about 12.7 million tonnes of plastic waste escapes into the oceans from coastal nations. That's equivalent to a truck load of garbage being emptied into the ocean every minute.

At the current rate of plastic usage, by 2050, there will be more plastic than fish in the oceans.