Microplastic Pollution and Our Planet: Assessing the Progress toward Real Solutions

This paper will explore progress and challenges in addressing the global environmental crisis of plastic pollution, with a specific emphasis on microplastics, which can potentially impact human health. There is a contradiction here: on the one hand, plastic was a transformative invention in medicine and other areas important to human well-being (e.g., water transport, food preservation, hygiene); on the other hand, it has become a global environmental problem. Waste colonialism is a specific problem in that waste plastic is being exported from the developed world, e.g., the UK, to the Global South, eg India. The highly profitable mass production of virgin plastic from oil and gas — far cheaper than recycling old plastic — means that the largest players in petrochemicals and petroleum production — DowDuPont, ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, BP and Sinopec — are all integrated companies that produce both fossil fuels and plastics. Most have their roots in the early decades of the 20th century, when the petroleum and chemical industries began to form alliances and vertically integrated companies. In summary, this paper will analyze plastic particles and examine potential upstream and downstream solutions to the environmental risks to ecosystems and human health.