What can we do about microplastics?

At the moment, there’s evidence of a smoking gun linking widescale plastic pollution with health impacts across the biosphere. But what, I asked marine biologist and microplastics specialist Richard Thompson, should be our next move?

Richard - Yeah, it's a really good question and often I feel it can be a distraction that, you know, if we make a mess I think it's almost in human nature to want to clean it up immediately. The challenge here is though at the minute the quantity of plastics going into the environment across the whole size spectrum is so immense that cleanup and focusing on cleanup alone would be a little bit like trying to mop the bathroom floor while the tap was still running and the bath was overflowing. We need a more systemic answer and some of that is going to involve reduction in the quantities we use.

If we think about the waste hierarchy it's reduce, reuse, recycle and it's clear to me there are some plastics that we could manage without but some plastic products, you know, whether that's a single-use carrier bag, a single-use water bottle, are we using plastics only in ways that are essential? What we really need is criteria to ensure that the plastics that are used and the products that are used are safer and more sustainable than they are today and that's safer in terms of the chemical composition. We also need to make sure that the plastics are more sustainable.

You can do that by reusing some plastic items, the single-use carrier bags, the refillable water bottles and beyond that for the plastics that are essential to us we need to try to design them to be more circular. And that's going to need us to simplify the format so that we can scale up recycling efforts. People will say to me, you know, we can't recycle our way out of here and recycling has failed and it has to an extent because we're only recycling globally less than 10% of all the plastics we produce. It's not just a problem associated with recycling technology.

The challenge as I see it is that we're failing to make items that are compatible with circularity. You look at the thousands of different chemical additives, the dozens of chemical permutations, the complex products that we're making for single-use applications that have multiple layers of different types of plastic that make them almost impossible to recycle. So in short, in order to improve that third R, the recyclability, the circularity, so that we're using end-of-life plastics as the carbon source for new plastics and if we can do that we decouple ourselves from the waste that we've talked about in the oceans and on the land but we also would decouple ourselves from the use of fossil oil and gas as a carbon source.

When I talk to product designers they say they were never asked to think about end-of-life. You know, even for a single-use bottle that seems incredible to me that you're designing something that brings convenience to humans for an instant yet can persist on the planet for hundreds if not thousands of years. That's the bit that's got to change.

We've got to think about plastics right from the design stage to make sure they're safer, more sustainable, don't escape to the environment and don't therefore release microplastics.