As an engineer that relies on plastics in my product design, I’ve been wondering more and more if we’re creating the next global environmental disaster after climate change with our use of plastics.

I recently saw a video of someone restoring a 100 year old vegetable shredder, and with some rust removal and fresh paint the thing was good as new. Of course it was all metal. Then I looked at Amazon for vegetable shredders and they’re almost all plastic.

We could make our products out of more metal or all metal. Even so-called exotic metals like titanium are relatively abundant, and new manufacturing processes are lowering the cost of those parts.

But we use so many plastic films that get used once and can’t be recycled, as have so many plastic products that fall apart and get sent to landfills because recycling is kind of a lie anyway. If you go to a big box store like Target, right at the entrance you see shelves of cheap plastic junk meant as some sort of novelty to be used once or twice and then forgotten and thrown out. Companies like Shien sell the cheapes polyester clothing possible which falls apart in to pieces which quickly become microplastics. EVs are supposed to save us from climate change but in doing so they’re delivering us faster wearing tires releasing more microparticles in to our environment.

And I suspect that if we look at production, it’s accelerating.

So just like when atmospheric carbon passed 300ppm and we said “what happens at 400ppm and higher”, what happens when ambient microplastics double, triple, or quadruple current levels?

What would it look like to cut plastic production today? How could we even prepare to do that?