Is Plastic Good or Bad? The Answer is Not What You Think

3,999 views Wait, is this logic right? • Sep 16, 2023

Slog Reference: Appreciating Plastic

Description

Many people believe that plastic should be banned because it is bad for the environment. But is it true? Would we have a better environment, systems and lifestyle without the use of any form of plastic? The answer will shock you.

I have the data and research with me to explain if plastic is the villain that everyone makes it to be. Or is it the anti-hero that has dark sides but also does immense good to society? Let's find out if plastic is good or bad, are plastic bottles or plastic bags harmful and should be banned in India or anywhere in the world.

More videos to rethink what you know:
Maps lie to you: https://youtu.be/qxEi0sz4oL8
Copying is good: https://youtu.be/2IedwFNMrBQ

Hope you enjoyed FutureIQ by Navin Kabra and Shrikant Joshi. Do hit us up on Twitter:
@ngkabra http://twitter.com/ngkabra
@shrikant https://twitter.com/shrikant

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Watch other episodes of The FutureIQ podcast: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAppTB0r5_TaYueZ0adD42Wiw5X-wTE4v

Chapters:
00:00 Plastic & India
00:20 Plastic bad
02:35 Plastic good
05:25 A world without plastic
06:40 Thermal insulation & pipes
07:40 Banning plastic
10:55 Cotton & paper bags
12:48 The best case
12:40 Conclusion

#futureiq #plasticban #plastic

Related Slog Matches

Appreciating Plastic

Manual

100.00

Transcript

- is plastic the worst thing modern science has produced or is it the best thing best but I don't know how you would even begin to describe it as the best but worst is definitely a candidate I think for those who are not aware of the worst let's first do the worst okay but we'll come to the best so don't go away so we create a lot of plastic and it is continuously increasing yes and unfortunately how much do you think is being recycled very little Matlab a lot of it ends up in the oceans and then marine life is only two percent only ten percent is recycled 90 percent is wasted and wasted mostly oceans or

0m 45s landfills yeah there's a huge plastic island in the ocean the other bad news is that once it ends up there it is not biodegradable so it's just going to stay there for thousands of years yes and it is going to get into the noses of little cute little and other fishies okay so a little good news is the fact that India is pretty good at recycling plastic okay that we are yes that I can definitely attest around 40 to 60 percent of plastic in India is recycled compared to like 10 percent average for the rest of the sounds about right 42 40 to 60 percent of plastic come into my home also gets recycled and we are not in the top 10

1m 31s plastic polluters of the world we are not we are not we are not correct so that's good but still I mean whatever plastic doesn't get recycled and goes it is dangerous because not just plastic Circ logging or drains but also microplastic so you know like teeny bits of plastic which just rub off from any plastic pieces or from the surface of plastic pipes those are Plastics even release toxic chemicals yeah and all of those are finding their way into the soil into the water into the in that animals the asbestos of Our Generation right and well asbestos was really bad I know but it's not that bad it's just I was trying to make a glib comparison Naveen let me

2m 18s make a glib comparison once in a while okay fine all right but yeah Plastics blocking or waterways also causes flooding yes right so plastic is the worst thing I I agree you've said nothing that I don't agree with I completely agree with all of it the world is improving we said that in one episode yes we have and it's a very good episode you should check that out um and that includes the fact that the world has produced far more plastic today than It produced earlier still improving because poor people are much better off and a lot of it has to do with plastic okay so many things have become much much cheaper and more durable

3m 05s because they are plastic okay I will give you that yes so there was a whole bunch of things that only rich people could afford but now poor people can also afford because plastic right because plastic plastic bottles plastic containers plastic all kinds of plastics okay but let's just think of food right everybody I'm always thinking of food yes everybody in the world needs food to survive the fact that we are being able to feed so many more people the population has increased we're feeding all of them most of them also the fact that the number of people in the world who are undernourished has gone down significantly right okay and the reason for that one of the big

3m 52s reasons for that is Plastics we are not feeding them plastic we're not feeding them plastic but the cost of producing the food has gone down because there is plastic being used in the production uh Cycles okay and that reduces the cost as in for Storage storage and even the machines being used to use a lot of plastic okay the production the storage and the transport all of those Cycles Parts have plastic somewhere involves yeah not just that enhances the durability of the durability is one thing for storage and transport the fact is that a plastic container can be much smaller than any other container similar container right wood would be so much thicker anything else would be so much

4m 37s thicker good plastic reduces the volume as well as the weight okay right so the cost of storage goes down the cost of Transport goes down a lot of costs have gone down to plastic what you pointed out earlier which is that because the packaging is so much better the amount spoiled goes down right you have air type packing yeah right you have water tight packing all of this and so much cheaper than any other method of doing airtight and water tight before Plastics came along that's that's true but then again those are the exact things that are also causing problems so let's focus on who are dying people who didn't have food before okay that's blackmail living

5m 22s but I get it go on it is estimated that without plastic right 40 to 50 more percent of food would be spoiled and it would cost the world 500 billion dollars the entire economy of Thailand is 500 billion dollars okay yeah so yeah that's yeah that's medical industry right yeah there's a lot of plastic in the medical industry so just take covered right we could not have defeated kovid without plastic syringes yeah right there 5x to 10 times cheaper than any other method of giving vaccines face Shields goggles masks right yeah and even you know other than kovid I mean in Cataract in the lens you use plastic technology artificial limbs if artificial teeth everything is so much I

6m 19s mean if you remember your grandfather going through a cataract operation or things to do with their teeth compared to now now is so much easier and so much cheaper and so many more people are able to do these things because Plastics and modern technology are made it easier right yeah a lot of plastic is invisible in a sense absolutely another example is not so much in India but in Western countries is that most houses have thermal insulation which is plastic to your polyurethane foam yeah right so that plastic insulation gives four billion dollars of Energy savings and it I mean reduces the volume of the insulation increases the quality of the insulation reduces the electricity consumed reduces the

7m 11s greenhouse gases and less people die of exposure right yeah but okay uh the treatment I've ever done anything related to house and construction and so on pipes used to be such a huge problem lead pipes and they have cracks and they rust and they leaker plastic pipes have made things so much easier okay so okay you are selling me on plastic part at the same time I also know that there are we we've already discussed the issues with plastic so it seems like a trade-off between cost savings versus life saving yes so which one do we go with cost saving or life-saving I would go with life saving oh wait wait plastic is Saving Lives also okay people wouldn't

7m 55s be able to eat plastic plates we would have only 60 percent of the food that we produce if it was not for plastic right Fair yes fair so cost saving with a bit of life saving also with a lot of life saving also but then listen we know plastic is bad for them so what are we doing about it we are trying to ban plastic straws we've already spoken about this that a lot of it is just shifting the blame by a game by corporations yeah but but yes I mean basically banning plastic straws is like you know the guy searching for his lost coin under the lamb although he lost it there somewhere but this is because this is

8m 42s easy to do and it is very visible yeah right but like I said in an earlier episode plastic straws are just 0.03 percent versions yeah that the things that have replaced the plastic straws come covered in plastic yes I mean it's a whole another level another I mean so plastic straws is totally stupid but a slightly better example is plastic bottled water people get very worked up about using bottled water in plastic and yeah but I reuse those bottles for several other users man I mean lots of people don't okay uh you read the drink and then they just throw it in fact they will throw it in the middle of the road or in like the

9m 27s most beautiful Park you know they will go find that and then throw the bottle right there go find that creams okay yes they do I have it right and people are some people are trying to replace it with you know we'll have glass bottles and we'll have glasses and metal bottles yeah situation there is not entirely clear okay okay what people miss about this is one the cost of making the glass bottle and transporting it and all of that is higher yeah the cost of washing it there is a non-trivial cost associated with washing it yeah both time and money cost most importantly just because people are not recycling the bottles doesn't mean they're not

10m 07s getting recycled India has a very well established machinery for doing that so it is estimated that more than 80 percent of plastic bottles in India actually get recycled yeah a lot of people banned plastic I do agree is theater and it's it's unnecessary theater yeah so a third third one again a situation is not entirely clear but there are parts that most people don't realize right plastic bags right so yes single use plastic bags are horrible you use it once and you throw it and then it clogs the drains and it sticks around and it's horrible but people do is that then replace it with like a cotton bag and that's actually much worse for the

10m 49s environment a cotton bag is worse for me much much worse okay okay basically a cotton bag I'll let me read right ukl Danish studies show that cotton bags you have to harvest the cotton and then some of the cotton gets wasted so you can only use a subset of it and there's lot of water that went into it land got used and so on Cotton in the water then you have to do ging to separate the cotton from the leaves 33 percent only is usable after this stage then you have to do Bales you have to spin it you have to weave it chemical cleaning bleaching dyeing printing everything uses lot water and electricity okay that's a lot

11m 30s of processes I hear you say say that um you can reuse a cotton bag would you like to know how many times would you have to reuse a cotton bag for it to have the same environmental impact as plastic uh a hundred times seventy one hundred okay wow if I have I have to use a cotton bag 7100 times to get the same environmental profile as a plastic bag as a single oh wow okay an organic if you use organic cotton that's even worse because it uses 30 percent more water and the yield per hectare of farm is 30 percent less okay have we been fooling ourselves Global paper yeah paper is better right yes but the

12m 19s problem is paper is six to ten times heavier than plastic okay right so you need to have 43 times reuse and also you can't really use paper bags for grocery shopping because a lot of other of course Limbs and paper bags you can't reuse that many times either plus paper bags means you're cutting down trees still the point Still Remains that yes plastic bags if you use once and throw it does clog up and it is part of the problem so we should be trying to reduce the use but I think the best use is reusable plastic bags right so which is basically every kind of plastic bag out no in India we do that well one is that

12m 58s those very thin plastic bags are almost impossible to reuse because after one or two users we have 50 Micron limit on the single use also so those are pretty much reusable to a large access and we should do that and that is excellent it's far better than using cotton bags and paper bags right wait a second did I go from plastic being the worst to actually figuring out ways to reuse plants so yes so now let's end the episode with further confusion as in we are not going to take either side and we are going to be in the middle and we'll say it depends it's okay I am thoroughly confused so we will simplify one is

13m 43s avoid single-use plastic bags that goes without saying we will use any plastic single use any plastic is is bad multi-use plastic okay so single-use straws are bad single use bottles are bad single use wrapping is bad yeah uh single use uh but but but but when you are doing multi-use and you are actually consuming the thing inside be careful I mean don't take like a water bottle plastic water bottle and reuse it for six months because uh that multi-use of plastic after a while can start leaching chemicals into the water and can cause problems similar things with food so don't reuse for a very long time take your supply to that BPA free plastic also the food grade plastic we'll have

14m 29s to check on that checklist that because there is food grade plastic and there is a difference between food grade plastic and your regular plastic but assuming you're mostly running into regular plastic don't you use but not a whole news with care yeah that applies everything in life another thing that we have done in our society is that we have set up a plastic recycling system right so all plastic packaging containers and so on uh or bags that after reuse we are like okay now this needs to be thrown right we collect it in a separate uh garbage bag in our house and then once a month there is a company called rudra plastic they come to our society and

15m 15s then take they take everybody's bags and they take it away to their Factory for recycling right I'm sure so rudra is just what happens to be there here locally but I'm pretty sure that most places big cities in India will have some kind of plastic recycling facility what do they recycled plastic into more plastic so what companies like this do right some of them convert it to poly fuel which is like a low quality diesel can't be used in your two wheelers or your cars but they can be used for furnaces for heating certain generators and so on that's a good use so some Plastics are converted into cloth okay okay uh you know right a lot of our

16m 01s clothes aren't in significant amounts of plastic yes in them right so most plastic bottles A lot of them end up in clothes some of them get converted into new Plastics also so various things are possible we leave a link to this company that he spoke about rudra was it yeah yeah the company is not important just there are various possibilities just figure out what is available locally for you figure out a way to locally recycle and uh you know reuse plastic or if there is a company that does that do that and set up something in your societies as well that's a very interesting way to end the episode I am now trying to think of all the

16m 42s plastic that I use and all the plastic that I shouldn't use and all the plastic that I should recycle I'll have to start making a list let's make the list but for now srikanth Naveen future IQ thank you thank you for watching till the end if you liked this episode check out these others you might like them also and please share with your friends I'm sure they will also like these