Posted in Academy reports, books, opinions and recommendations
Report from the Académie des Sciences – Paris, March 2021
Résumé
Plastics, polymers of very variable composition, have become objects of everyday use. The diversity of their chemical composition gives them unique properties in the world of materials: rigidity, flexibility or elasticity, mechanical and chemical resistance. Their fields of application are multiple: airplanes, automobiles, buildings, medical prostheses, computers … They also allow the conservation and transport of industrial, food, medical and pharmaceutical products under unequaled hygienic conditions. Plastics have become indispensable and their global annual production, which has grown from 1.5 million tonnes in 1950 to more than 350 million tonnes today, is still growing steadily.
Difficult to recycle and difficult to digest by microorganisms, they are a source of environmental pollution when they are massively produced for short-term uses, often less than a year, or for single use. Considered then as waste, they are thrown into landfills, often poorly controlled, or transported to sorting centers where only a small fraction will be effectively recycled. A large part of the plastics used is released into the environment where they degrade and pollute continents, freshwater and oceans.
The Academy of Sciences notes that efforts have already been made to reduce aquatic pollution by plastics but it stresses that they are insufficient to prevent a massive accumulation of this waste in continental and ocean ecosystems over the coming decades. To better control the plastics economy, she recommends:
• continue individual and collective efforts to reduce pollution at source by calling for sobriety of consumption, particularly in terms of packaging, by improving sorting and by encouraging manufacturers to set up research and development programs aimed at replacing convenience plastics with more easily depolymerizable polymers;
• provide for the recycling of plastics from their conception to facilitate the transition to a circular economy;
• develop polymers with low environmental impact, capable of biodegrading in continental and marine environments under the action of microorganisms;
• launch an ambitious national and international research program within the framework of the International Science Council (ISC), to understand the biogeochemical cycle of plastic waste discharged into the environment, to determine the flows and sizes of the particles transported in the environment. air, freshwater and marine waters and thus predict their future;
• better assess the impact of plastic degradation products on wildlife and human health by studying the behavior of micro- and nanoplastics at the concentrations actually present in natural environments and by calling on epidemiological research;
• study the possibility of blocking plastic waste by inserting it into long-lived materials, such as those used in heavy tonnage for the construction of buildings.
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