Ambivalent Attitude towards Plastics

By Misun Kang

A various plastics products influence our world in positive and negative way. People should be aware of using plastics a lot in their lives. They also need to learn how to use plastics appropriately. The advantages of plastics are convenient, reasonable price and durable. On the other hand, disadvantages of plastics are environmental problems, people’s perception to plastics, and health problem. Humans cannot live without plastics in this modern era but they have to consider plastics harmfulness and caution to plastics use.

People live in plastics world. When they woke up, they grab a plastic tooth brush and a plastic cup to brush teeth. Plastics also involved in everywhere even in the liquids or somewhere we did not even expect. For example, microbeads which are very tiny plastic beads usually in scrubs and toothpaste for cleansing perfectly. These may seem trivial but its effect is very critical to the environment. Even UNEP reports that a typical exfoliating shower gel can contain roughly as much microplastics as is used to make its plastic packaging. Consumers should stop to choose products including microbeads, but it is hard to distinguish that products contain them or not. Therefore, US government will ban microbeads from personal care products. It is an effective way to reduce lots of microbeads which are hardly biogradable in the ecosystem and visible in human eyes.

Unfortunately, our contemporaries cannot live without plastics because plastics have already come so deeply in their life. They generated massive trash to pollute environment and people even did not feel guilty about using them. Due to their chemical and artificial elements, plastics are far from environment friendly and also there have limits to reuse plastics again and again. Therefore, we should accept this serious circumstance and try to reduce using plastics at first. For instance, using eco bags when we go get some groceries and checking the components in household items can be a good start.

  Plastics are inextricably linked with daily life and people keep exposing to them unconsciously. Citizens and government both should perceive the perils of plastics. Especially, microbeads which are so small that people even do not recognize those as plastics, so government makes some restriction on them. Indifference about plastics is the greatest fear, so people definitely need to take an action. Through government regulations and careful consumption behaviors, it can help people wisely take action to deal with plastics.