free topic: plastic

 

Imagine a world without plastic. For my college seminar project I am working on the creation of a material that in the future could replace the single-use plastics present in our society and obviously I have been shocked with the amount of garbage that we as humans produce.

Talking to my mom about her life when she was a child, she told me about how things were sold before and that plastic already existed but it was not so common, everything used to be sold in newspaper "cones", a kind of cones made of newspapers and so they sold everything that today comes in plastic bags. 

Life used to be less comfortable, now we want everything immediately and we want it ready, like the vegetables that are sold cut into small pieces and wrapped in a thousand layers of plastic.

Sometimes I think about the damage caused by the material but I see it impossible for people to stop consuming it, I try every day to reduce my consumption and even so I never manage to be free, everything has even a piece of plastic.

On the other hand it is so hard to face the crisis that this material will leave us, we see and we see how plastic islands grow in the ocean and the repercussions they generate but still we remain the same, I once read that a person currently consumes the equivalent of a credit card in plastic per year, this because the micro plastics from the ocean end up in our water and food. 

It is brutal the environmental impact of a material that was so promising and that is so functional for our society. I still imagine a world without plastics and I hope it will happen someday.