Malaysians are the world’s biggest consumers of plastics. And we need to take a hard look at what we need to do about all that plastic waste. How about turning them into clothes, roads and pavements?
PLASTICS, especially microplastics, are bad for us. Yes, we know. We have been told that a million times. But how bad are these microplastics, really?
Well, here’s something that’s likely to shock the pants off many men – some 322 million will be suffering from erectile dysfunction next year.
There are about four billion men on Earth. Do the math; that means one out of every 12 men will be suffering from ED!
There may be many reasons for the problem – pollution, smoking and alcohol, among others. But scientists have also found one other thing in men who suffer from ED and low sperm count. Yes, microplastics!
What’s worse, the sperm count around the world has halved over the past 50 years. And the global prevalence of male infertility has increased by 76.9% since 1990. The global birth rate has dropped to about 17.3 per thousand population. It was 33 in 1970 and 28 in 1980.
We could be heading for extinction. Really. And plastics could be playing a big part in the non-survival of our species.
According to University of Miami scientists, when we ingest microplastics there are two “vascular organs” that they head to – the heart and the penis.
So, men end up with either heart problems or a “hard problem”. We in the Asian region, especially Malaysians, should be worried.
Malaysia, after all, ranks the highest among 109 countries in consuming microplastics, according to a study.
Our neighbours are little better. Indonesia is ranked second and the Philippines is fourth. Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Cambodia take up the fifth to eighth places. That’s seven Asean nations in the top eight.
The problem is we are dumping plastics into our waterways.
The numbers are mind-boggling. It is believed there could be more than 100 million tonnes of plastic waste in our oceans, with about two million tonnes being added each year.
All that plastic is turning out to be a killer both of marine life and human life, and we really need to do something about it. So much of marine life is now eating plastics. And we, in turn, are eating these fish and other seafood.
Forget fish, or the sharks and whales with plastic bags in the bellies, even the tiny plankton are ingesting microplastics. Little fish then eat the plankton, and we eat them when they get bigger.
And, in this region, we eat a lot of seafood. After all, much of Malaysia, both the peninsula and Borneo, is surrounded by water and fishing is a major livelihood.
If we are to stop eating plastic, we first need to stop it from getting into the seas around us. We need to stop using plastics. And even if we do use them, we need to re-use and re-use before ensuring that they end up in landfills or incinerators, not our waterways.
Wednesday is International No Plastic Bag day and now is as good a time as any to start learning our lessons.
The study on consumption of plastics says governments should incentivise the “removal of free plastic debris from freshwater and saltwater environments through advanced water treatment and effective solid waste management practices”.
That sounds like a lot of work for the government. Instead, we can just reuse the plastics in a big way. And there are many ways to do so.
For one, you could wear them. Many companies are now recycling plastics into fashion. They clean plastic bags and bottles and shred them into flakes.
These are then melted into tiny pellets, which can be turned into yarn.
Then, the yarn is woven into modern, sustainable clothing.
The producers, from the Western world to Dubai and India, claim these clothes are better than polyester. But there are detractors. Washing these clothes, they say, will see microplastics ending up in our waterways again.
However, it is still better than not doing anything.
Recycled plastic feedstock or polyethylene terephthalate (rPET) is becoming fashionable, literally, with even several big-name brands joining the bandwagon.
Using this recycled polyester to make new fabric uses less energy and resources as makers use existing plastic and don’t need to burn coal and petrol to produce fresh polyester.
Here’s some more math: Opening a bottle’s screw cap releases 500 microplastic particles per turn. And plastic bottles shed microplastics forever.
One T-shirt can remove nine plastic bottles from circulation, a pair of shoes can take 11 plastic bottles out. Imagine if we had millions of such T-shirts and shoes on the market.
There are also other methods to get plastics out of the way, like building roads. While there are questions about how roads made from recycled plastics can survive during heatwaves, India – where a heatwave only recently killed 60 people – has built more than 2,500km of such roads.
Plastic roads are also being built in many other countries, and we don’t have to go far to find them.
Singapore is already doing it. Some parts of the republic’s West Coast Highway, the Pan-Island Expressway and Jalan Buroh in Boon Lay now have recycled plastic waste in them.
Plastic bottles, bags and milk cartons have been reprocessed into pellets to be added to the asphalt when paving these roads.
Singapore is also using finely ground plastic instead of sand when mixing concrete to make road kerbs. That would not just take plastics out of circulation, it could even take the hard edge off those kerbs.
Maybe we don’t need so many English teachers from across the Causeway. We have a fair number of retired teachers here.
Instead, we could get the Singaporeans to come over and teach us how to reuse our plastics. That should not be too hard.
Oh, and did you notice? Singapore is not on the list of top countries consuming plastics.
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