The world is drowning in plastic

To meet demand for plastics, refineries designed to produce automobile fuel are being upgraded to produce more chemicals, including plastic precursors. The new refineries built in the Middle East, Asia-Pacific and China are fully integrated chemical facilities.

Petrochemicals (chemicals obtained from oil during refining and used to make thousands of products, including plastics) will be the biggest driver of global oil demand, according to a 2018 report from the International Energy Agency. Almost half of growth by 2050.

IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a statement at the time that petrochemicals were “a blind spot in the global energy debate.” Plastics are one of the reasons why it is difficult for us to give up plastic use. Incredibly cheap in production.

But this is not their only advantage. Plastics have chemical properties that make them indispensable in medicine. They are sterile, flexible and inexpensive enough to be thrown away after a single use; This is a boon for infection control.

Founding director of the Yale Program on Environmental Sustainability in Health Care, Dr. In her research, Jody Sherman found that the medical industry is moving away from reusable equipment and toward disposable equipment.

According to a 2022 article published in the AMA Journal of Ethics, Plastic accounts for 20% to 25% of waste generated in US healthcare facilities. And the use of single-use plastic in healthcare may increase, though it’s difficult to determine exactly how much. There’s no easy way to measure this.

Medical waste accounts for a large portion of all plastic waste / Photo: Unsplash

What should I do

To go beyond oil researchers will need to develop a way to produce plastic on a large scale from non-oil sources. Soybean cultivation in the United States has increased significantly, thanks in part to its use as biofuel. Something similar could happen if we move to bioplastics, or plastics made from renewable biomass such as corn starch or polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs), which are naturally occurring polyesters that can be biodegraded by microorganisms.

But bioplastics are not without problems. Not all bioplastic materials are biodegradable and many require industrial processes to be returned to nature. Compared to traditional plastic production, bioplastic production results in lower greenhouse gas emissions. But like traditional analogues, bioplastics form microplastics when decomposed. They are also much more expensive to produce and do not always have ideal properties for every application.

For example, medical equipment in hospitals needs to be durable and reusable, so the easier degradation of bioplastics is not an advantage, but a problem.

Bioplastics are already used in some areas of medicine, but the level is “incredibly low,” said Robert Langer, a professor at MIT’s David Koch Institute for Biological Engineering. Durability is a surmountable challenge, Langer said, but a bigger hurdle is that everything used in medical facilities must be tested for safety before use, which is prohibitively expensive.

Health and safety regulations require materials used in medical facilities to withstand extremely harsh conditions. Plastics must repeatedly withstand the high temperatures and pressures required for sterilization, for example. “Biodegradable plastics may not withstand these conditions and may not have the required period of stability.”
– says chemical engineer Jan-Georg Rosenboom from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This doesn’t mean healthcare will use traditional plastic indefinitely. Rather, what happens in the petrochemical industry will determine how plastic is used. If the market changes and demand for petroleum-based plastics declines significantly in other industries, the medical industry is likely to follow suit.