The Plasticene Era
Where is ‘kingdom come’?
From the Ice Age to the Space Age, people have tended to locate the realm of eternity and immortality in heaven
This age-old assumption has become obsolete. Everlasting conditions are occurring here on Earth.
We are living in the Plasticene Age.
Bright Eke alerts his audience to the environmental dangers and social horrors that accompany one particular example of material longevity – plastic water containers. They are his medium and his message.
Water bottles and bags are manufactured from petroleum products. This fact accounts for three major environmental concerns related to their use:
– depletion of nonrenewable natural resources
– environmental impact associated with the extraction of oil, the refining process, and the subsequent manufacturing of plastics
– blight due to discarded plastic waste.
Future archeologists studying the Plasticene Age are likely to discover a surplus of material artifacts. This is because no bacteria or fungi have jaws that are big enough to eat its long-chain molecules. Thus, despite the fact that they are made from the organic molecules that originated from early life forms, plastics are mostly immune to the biodegrading cycle that replenishes the earth’s supplies of nutrients. In addition, plastic’s amazing variety complicates conventional recycling programs.
The convoluted route from plastic discard to plastic resource requires collecting, inspecting, sorting, floating, filtering, drying, baling, washing, shredding, extruding, melting, cooling, pressing, and chopping.
After all this effort, the end product is always a down-scaled version of the original material. This leaves manufacturers with two options. Either virgin materials are added to recover the plastic’s original quality, or the recycled plastic is used in its compromised state for such products as outdoor furniture, timber substitutes, and crates.
These observations are offered to reinforce Eke’s searing indictment of the petroleum industry, water merchandisers, and plastic container manufacturers. It is an appeal for consideration of the costs of extraction and disposal as well as productivity.