Acknowledging our Plastic Pandemic

Pandemic: An epidemic that has spread across multiple countries or continents, affecting a large number of people worldwide – Merriam-Webster

Way back on May 6 of 2019 I kicked off this Creation Justice blog by addressing what I deemed to be the greatest existential threat to life on planet Earth that humanity has ever faced, the existential threat of global warming/climate change. A topic of that magnitude, an issue of such gravity would be a hard act to follow.

What would/should I choose to be the next weighty topic to give this fledgling blog wings? In what would turn out to be the year before the great Covid 19 pandemic, there was already a problem of pandemic proportions that was bugging me. My second post would address the proliferation of a relatively recent substance to appear upon the planet, an unnatural polymer concocted by human ingenuity that has surpassed epidermic proportions to become, for all its virtues, a plague upon the planet.

Fast forward to today, seven years and a couple months after that second blog post. As we near the end of the seventh month of 2026, I am aware that we are also nearing the conclusion to yet another “Plastic Free July” campaign, a global emphasis that annually challenges people to refuse single-use plastics and reduce overall plastic waste. And while that is all well and good, it is not the solution to the problem, not the vaccine for the pandemic. I find myself musing about the plastic pandemic that has sickened Earth’s environment, and feeling somewhat nostalgic about a more pristine time in Earth’s history when there were no plastic objects to sicken Earth and all its inhabitants.

As omnipresent as the synthetic polymer substance we call ‘plastic’ is in today’s overdeveloped and under preserved world, there was a time when it was not. Nowhere in the Genesis creation account do we read, “And God said, ‘Let there be plastic’… And God saw that it was good.” There is nothing natural about plastic. To this day, the only place in the cosmos where plastic exists is on planet Earth (not accounting for the ‘space junk’ we’ve already hurtled into the heavens).

Not only does plastic exist as a part of this industrialized, profit driven world, but it problematically exists in teeming overabundance. From the highest heights to the deepest depths, in every nook and cranny of the planet and even within the structure of plants and the bodies of animals, nothing and no one can escape the prolific, pestilent presence of plastic. This now makes the ongoing proliferation of plastics an existential threat to the planet’s living organisms.

From National Geographic –
Some key facts about the past, present and future of plastics:

• Half of all plastics ever manufactured have been made in the last 15 or so years.

• Production increased exponentially, from 2.3 million tons in 1950 to 448 million tons by 2015. Production is expected to double by 2050.

• Every year, about 8 million tons of plastic waste escapes into the oceans from coastal nations. That’s the equivalent of setting five garbage bags full of trash on every foot of coastline around the world.

• Plastics often contain additives making them stronger, more flexible, and durable. But many of these additives can extend the life of products if they become litter, with some estimates ranging to at least 400 years to break down.

In 2024 it was projected that humanity would produce more than 350 million metric tons of plastic waste in that year alone. And without changes to current policies, global plastic waste generation is projected to triple by 2060 to one billion metric tons, or approximately the weight of 10,000 fully loaded aircraft carriers. The majority of that plastic waste eventually ends up in the world’s oceans. While most of such waste is visible on and beneath the surface of the seas and littered along beaches, that which is not consumed or retrieved in bulk form will eventually break down into unseen microscopic particles that contaminate the air, land and water upon which all living organisms depend for their existence.

In this insidious invisible form, Matt Simon, author of A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies, says microplastics are “the pernicious glitter that has bastardized the whole earth.”

While results from studies attempting to quantify levels of human ingestion vary dramatically, they suggest people might be consuming on the order of tens of thousands of microplastic particles per person per year. So, how much is that? The University of Newcastle study, commissioned by the World Wildlife Fund for Nature, found that the average person could consume around 5 grams (appx. 2000 pieces) of microplastic each week, or about the weight of the average credit card. Plastics in general, and microplastics in particular, emit potent greenhouse gases like carbon and methane as they degrade, not to mention the extremely carbon-intensive process of producing them in the first place.

At the end of the day, Simon says, individual responsibility can only go so far to mitigate the potential risks. He notes how the plastics industry largely sidestepped stricter regulations in the 1980s and 1990s by promoting recycling “as this thing that was our responsibility as consumers” even though less than 10% of plastics worldwide are actually recycled today. A similar situation is now playing out with microplastics.

“We can take steps to lessen our emissions of microplastics and lessen the amount of plastic that we’re buying in general,” he said. But that only goes so far: “What’s really needed,” he added, “are stricter production controls and increased government oversight of a very loosely regulated industry. We need our government and we need to elect politicians that take this seriously.”

And to that I say “Amen!” Let us remember that when we head to the polls this fall.

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For further reading as Plastic Free July comes to a close, but our work does not:

https://advancedplastiform.com/blog/the-history-of-plastics-one/

https://advancedplastiform.com/the-history-of-plastics-part-ii-1935-through-1980/

https://www.earthday.org/you-are-what-you-eat-plastics-in-our-food/

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/great-pacific-garbage-patch/