Plastics Problem
We owe it to the next generation
Plastic Waste
The estimated 8 billion kilograms of plastic that ends up in the ocean every year is expected to double by 2025.
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Effect on Marine Life
These plastics will not only kill more animals; they will decimate coral reefs and damage human health as microplastics enter the food chain.
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Contamination
More alarming, as larger plastics linger in the water and they break down into ‘microplastics’ that scientists are now finding: in fish, fertilizers, table salt, and in 93 percent of bottled water.
3
Plastic Utilization
A new way of thinking.....
01
Despite, increasing awareness of pollution, the use of plastics continues to broaden and increase.
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We continue to find more uses for plastics, which has the impact of increasing its production.
03
Life would be challenging without plastics since we unconsciously use it all the time.
Plastic Utilization
The problem of managing plastics
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The problem is what to do with plastics at the end of their life.
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China’s decision to ban “foreign garbage” has had the effect of unveiling the true extent of the crisis and how it has been getting progressively worse year on year, on a global scale.
Need of the hour
A step to prevent plastic crisis
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There is now an alarming need for new and additional methods to get rid of plastic.
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“There may be alternative markets but they’re not ready today,” said Emmanuel Katrakis, the secretary general of the European Recycling Industries’ Confederation in Brussels.
ER Solution to the Rescue
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The ER solution is a real solution to a real problem that can be implemented now. While bans of plastic straws and bags will help highlight the problem to the general public, ER offers a sustainable solution that attacks at the heart of the crisis NOW.
our oceans annually
single use
every minute
plastic to degrade in the environment
is used on plastic production annually
Plastics Problem
Global Context
There will likely be additional unknown impacts of plastics in the ecosystem given researchers have only been studying ocean plastics for less than two decades.
So, what has changed to create this global crisis
A large proportion of waste that is not reused, recycled, or used for energy recovery is disposed into landfill.
The largest landfill utiliser in the world has been China. China was responsible for processing the majority of the worlds’ waste including paper, metals and used plastic.
In July 2017, China notified the World Trade Organization (WTO) that it intended to ban some imports of waste, saying the action was needed to protect the environment and improve public health.
The worlds plastic crisis has been escalated and magnified by China’s decision to ban “foreign garbage”, referred to as “yang laji”.
Beijing wrote to the WTO in 2017 and stated,
“Large amounts of dirty wastes or even hazardous wastes are mixed in the solid waste that can be used as raw materials. This polluted China’s environment seriously.”
Ever since China’s announcement that it no longer wanted to be the “world’s garbage dump”. At the time, it was recycling about half of the globe’s plastics and paper products. The ban came into effect on 1 January 2018.
Since that time, the world has struggled with what to do in respect of disposing of its unrecyclable end of life plastics. The repercussions of this ban are continuing to reverberate.
With the China ban preventing the shipping of the problem offshore, countries are now exposed to having uneconomical means to commercially recycle the plastics they produce. This has led to the bulk of the plastics being rejected from the recycling process and left with the only options being either landfill or incineration in the country of origin.