Environmental Conflicts: The Cause Of Plastic Degradation

Introduction
Plastic has become an important part of all our lives for many years, making it one of the most essential assets for humanity. We use plastic on a daily basis and it comes in many different forms. Generally we have two kinds of plastics for commercial use, there are thermoplastics which can be reheated, melted and molded into different shapes and thermosetting plastics which degrade and are converted to other elements if reheated after molding. Most plastics produced for commercial use have certain additives to them which help producers to get desired traits for the plastic, like improved strength. It is these additives that present some of the conflicts associated with plastics, together with the fact that most plastic is not

This means that the process of degradation is much slower than the rate of production and this leads to an increase in extent of environment pollution. This increasing pile up of plastic waste has caused major conflicts and understandably so because of the resultant negative impacts. Generally there is no environmentally safe plastic disposal method yet. The chemical composition of plastics is that of toxic elements which sip into the ground and water bodies, thereby polluting the water and the soil. The non-degrading nature of plastics and irresponsible/careless disposal has resulted in formation of plastic islands in the seas where you find clusters of plastic waste floating in the sea (fig 1 below). Environmental pollution does not only result from plastic disposal. The process of making plastic itself releases hormone altering and neurotoxic chemicals, some of which are the most damaging toxins on the planet (Koushal V, Sharma R, Sharma M, Sharma R, Sharma V (2014)). This environmental pollution of plastics also ruins the aesthetic value of the

This kind is very much similar to the conventional plastic only with an added trait of decomposing into natural and safe byproducts (Koushal V, Sharma R, Sharma M, Sharma R, Sharma V (2014)). An example of this are the plastic products from the company A Rafkin Co. The company has plastics designed to be 100% biodegradable. The process entails exposure of the plastics to sunlight which breaks down the plastic into smaller wastes. As time goes by, these smaller wastes are further transformed to natural elements such CO2, H2O and biomass and minerals. Microorganisms then consume what is left of the smaller plastic waste