LEARNING PATH. Plastics and the circular economy.
Our relationship with plastic needs rethinking. Plastics are versatile materials, but the way we use them is incredibly wasteful. We take oil and gas from the earth to make plastic products that are often designed to be used only once, and then we throw them away. This is what we call a linear take-make-waste model.
Year on year, millions of tonnes of plastic, worth billions of dollars, ends up in landfills, is burned, or leaked into the environment. A staggering 8 million tonnes leaks into the ocean every year — and that number is rising. If we don’t rethink its use, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish (by weight) by 2050.
No-one wants to be in this position. Is it possible to rethink the way we design, use, and reuse plastics to create a circular economy for plastic?
