Famed author Margaret Atwood has written an opinion for The Guardian:
But now I have been asked the following question: if given the chance, what institution would I myself reform? To which I reply: what institutions do we have that are both in need of reformation and powerful enough to be worth the trouble? And the risk, as once you start reforming, heads may roll. Many candidates spring to mind: international banks, the oil business, big pharma, and so on.
But of them I know little.
So I would choose to reform plastics. Are plastics an institution? Not in the sense of having a pope, or even a small cabal of leaders. But they are surely the modern equivalent of a universal religion. We worship them, whether we admit it or not. Their centre is whatever you happen to be doing, their circumference is everywhere; they’re as essential to our modern lives as the air we breathe, and they’re killing us. They must be stopped.
So long as crude oil prices are low, this will have a hard time happening, although not all plastics derive from petrochemicals. But if those prices get boosted, then so will be the price of plastic.
And there’s a whole industry waiting to spring into existence if it does, because of all the artifacts plastic has enabled; not just made cheaper, but really permitted to exist at all. In order to keep them around, we’ll need replacements.
Of course, that brings up the topic of whether or not we should want to keep them around. Our Western world is positively fraught with things, isn’t it? Perhaps we’d have more time to think if we had less things to do with. But that might have some negative impacts on our economic model of constant growth. A bit of a sticky wicket in a nation of continually growing population… so perhaps we need that replacement industry after all.
