World plastic crisis: Awareness and circular economy can save the day

The lure of plastics has been irresistible for modern civilisation. It is difficult to imagine modern life without plastics. They are ubiquitous. Whether it is our house or car or hospitals or schools, it can be seen everywhere. The global plastics market was valued at over $700 billion in 2023, as per Statista 2023, and continues to grow, reflecting its economic significance, driven by its versatility, low cost, and usefulness across various sectors.

This is not merely a matter of convenience or coincidence; plastics have made possible many of the advances we take for granted—sterile equipment, lightweight vehicles, affordable consumer goods, and safe food storage. For many developing countries, plastics have often meant access to basic modernity at a lower cost.

It was not always so. The explosion in use of plastic began in the 1950s, shortly after World War II. That decade marks a distinct turning point—when plastic moved from being a technical novelty or wartime substitute to becoming part of everyday life. What had been used for military gear, insulation, and medical equipment found its way into toys, packaging, clothing, household goods, and cars.

Global plastic production, which was under 2 million tonnes in 1950, crossed 400 million tonnes by 2020 and continues to rise. The value of plastics in our lives is immense and continues to grow. The problem is its long-term environmental consequences, which may also be equally significant.

What makes plastics so attractive in the near-term perspective is not difficult to fathom. Plastics can acquire almost any characteristic one would like to see in them, making them the miracle material that they are. Just as colourless water can attain any colour, plastics can attain any property, even contrasting ones.

For example, some, like polycarbonate and certain polyimides, are ultra-clear and durable, finding use in astronaut helmets, riot shields, and spacecraft windows; yet others are completely opaque, perfect for concealing contents or mimicking wood, ivory, or stone in art forgeries. Similarly, some plastics are bulletproof; some are stronger than steel (eg, Kevlar), while others are hyper-elastic or even water-soluble, like PVA, used in dissolvable laundry pods.

Plastics, normally non-conductors, can also conduct electricity, thanks to additives like carbon or metallic particles. Some plastics can respond to magnetic fields or bend light like optical fibres and camera lenses, yet others can even conduct heat. They can be used in electronics cooling, while some are designed to resist fire, freezing, or extreme heat and can be used in firefighting gear.

But that is not all. Some plastics are even smart. Self-healing polymers can fix small cracks on their own. Shape-memory plastics can regain their original form when heated. Others, called “living plastics”, are embedded with microbes that produce chemicals or decompose the material under specific conditions.

They are now being explored as precise vaccine delivery systems through plastic nanoparticles. Indeed, medical science relies heavily on plastics. From artificial hearts made of polyurethane, to PEEK bone implants that mimic human stiffness, plastics go inside the body. Silicone and hydrogels create soft, flexible blood vessels, while dental plastics like PMMA make up fillings and retainers. Biodegradable sutures made from shrimp-shell chitosan, and smart bandages that aid healing, show how far plastics have come from just packaging.

Whether it is infrastructure or defence, plastics have a use like no other material. Plastics from waste can be used in building roads, like in India and some other countries, and can also be used in stealth aircraft, helping them stay hidden through radar-absorbing plastics. Even nuclear reactors rely on boron-infused plastics to manage radiation—showing how these materials can manage the invisible forces of modern life.

From banana peels to bulletproof shields, spacesuits to smart fabrics, and invisible circuits to edible coatings, plastics aren’t just a single invention—they’re a universe of materials. Each type tells a story of human ingenuity, environmental challenge, and futuristic potential.

And yet, there is this other side of long-term environmental consequence that is equally compelling. A miracle in the short term and a challenge in the long term like no other. Once they enter the environment, they go nowhere—their permanence overshadowing their short-term utility.

What makes plastics the wonder material they are in the near term are additives, which also make them the challenge they are in the long term. The additives often carry toxins and take centuries to degrade. Even then, they convert into micro- and nanoplastics, carrying and leaching toxins, and are still around us, in our land, water and air, invisible but shadowing us everywhere. Once in the environment, they go nowhere and stay with us, in visible and invisible form.

The full impact of these may not be known yet, but what we know already should make us pause and think about whether we can get serious about dealing with a challenge that threatens the health of our future generations and our own.

Nature Scientific Reports, 2020, confirmed the presence of microplastics in human placenta, a chilling revelation that plastics have breached the sacred barrier between mother and child. Environment International, 2022, reported that microplastics were found circulating in human blood, silently hitching a ride to every organ, every tissue. This is then no longer a distant concern. Plastics are now inside us, altering our biology in ways we do not yet fully understand.

We cannot see the invisible particles. We cannot smell the toxic fumes. We cannot feel the long-term accumulation. But we may be adapting and developing immunity of some sort. Plastic immunity—an ability to tolerate the very toxins we have unleashed—might one day be our children’s inheritance.

But this adaptation would surely not be something that humanity can be proud of. It would be an evolutionary compromise: a path that sidesteps intelligence and ascension and instead finds a way to survive through passive tolerance of the very poison that surrounds us.

Imagine a future where our children, born with plastic-resistant immune systems, can live with the pollution we created. Can we really call this progress when it comes at the expense of their well-being, their cognitive development, and their very connection to the world around them?

Will they know a world where the ocean is clean, where the air is pure, where life flows freely, or will they inhabit a world where the plastic waste of past generations defines the very texture of their lives?

This is not the trajectory of civilisation we imagined. Perhaps evolution will adapt us to this world of plastic. But it will not be a pathway to evolutionary improvement but an evolution towards decay. The plastics we discarded with abandon will become part of the very foundation of life itself—not through innovation or human ingenuity, but through human abdication of the very responsibility that could have saved us.

No matter how much we may like to deny its ubiquitousness, plastics have, over time, transcended their role as material and morphed into an environment of their own. We now live within plastic, and plastic increasingly lives within us.

We can now find plastics in the deepest trenches of the ocean, in Arctic ice, in mountain air—and in human blood, lungs, placenta, and testicles. We now carry microplastics and nanoplastics not just in what we touch or inhale, but inside the very organs that define our vulnerability, our fertility, and our humanity.

Animal studies show that nanoplastics can breach the blood-brain barrier. While more human studies may be needed, the trajectory is unmistakable. The foetus, once considered protected, is no longer spared. The cradle of life has plastic embedded in its walls.

And yet, the response remains muted—because the risk is not dramatic or immediate. Plastics do not kill in a moment; they erode across a lifetime. No single cancer or Alzheimer or neurological disorder can be conclusively attributed to them. The blame is diffused. The pain is silent. The threat, invisible.

Biodegradable plastics, often heralded as a solution to plastic pollution, come with their own quiet irony. Some biodegradable plastics may disintegrate rapidly under certain conditions, but this visual disappearance can be often misleading. Most of these may carry chemical additives—plasticisers, colourants, stabilisers—that don’t biodegrade. The result is a sort of aesthetic illusion; the form may fade, but the footprint remains. Toxins linger, seeping quietly into soils, waters, and sometimes into food chains.

This raises a deeper question—are we being soothed by surface-level solutions while the core problems persist? The dominant biodegradable materials on the market today often blur the line between ecological promise and chemical compromise. We may be shifting the shape of pollution without solving its substance. It is not what we get rid of; it is what we leave behind.

Further, even amongst biodegradable plastics, some may require industrial composting facilities like PLA—often difficult to achieve—while others like PHAs may be truly biodegradable in marine and soil environments and do not leave toxic additives behind, the main concern. Though they may be costlier at present, mass production and innovations can make them a competitive and safer alternative. Solutions do exist, provided there is collective desire for a safer future.

But even if we were to shift entirely to safe, biodegradable plastics tomorrow, we are still left with the weight of the past—8.3 billion tonnes of plastic produced since the 1950s, much of it still out there in some form. Landfilled, buried, drifting in oceans, floating in the atmosphere, or broken down invisibly into micro- and nanoplastics.

These fragments carry with them not just the original polymers but a cocktail of persistent toxins—flame retardants, heavy metals, and endocrine disruptors—that don’t disappear when the plastics fade away from our sight.

What we are facing is not just a future challenge but a legacy crisis. The problem is not merely disposal; it is permanence. Plastic, unlike organic matter, does not return harmlessly to nature. It transitions into smaller, more invasive forms, slipping into bloodstreams, crossing the placenta, and lodging in brain tissue, carried by wind, rain, and time itself.

This material memory of the Anthropocene will outlast our lifespans and likely our institutions. Even as innovations accelerate further, we need to reckon with what has already been left behind—on land and in oceans. And yes, while we may not be able to do much about the invisible plastics that are already left behind from the past, we can certainly do a lot to improve our collective future by managing the rest.

The answer lies in creating a truly circular economy and mass awareness about the urgency of action at a global level. A range of models—extended producer responsibility, green taxes on virgin plastics, offset funds, plastic credit markets, green labelling, eco-design incentives, deposit-refund systems, and bans on specific single-use items—illustrate how a well-thought-out mix of economic and regulatory instruments can shift both producers and consumers toward more sustainable behaviour. It is not whether we can do it; it is whether we care enough to do it.

It is already late, but that is no reason to postpone action. The world stands at a pivotal moment in its relationship with plastic. A binding UN Global Plastics Treaty, with core principles of circularity in its DNA—equity, traceability, and accountability—may just be the trigger needed to galvanise collective action. The world can succeed, provided it acts decisively, individually and collectively, for our own sake and for the sake of future generations.

The question is no longer whether we must act but whether we can afford not to. The guilt of mismanagement would not arise if we did not have the answers, but the guilt cannot be wished away if we had the answers and we chose not to implement them. The greatest danger of plastic is not its presence but our growing tolerance of it. The real toxin is not in the molecule but in our numbness to it.

This is not just an environmental imperative—it is an economic, health, and moral reckoning. Achieving near-total plastic circularity is not only feasible; it is the most cost-effective and humane path forward in a global economy increasingly shaped by resource constraints and planetary boundaries. Plastic is no longer a material; it is a crisis. And how we respond will shape more than our environment; it will shape us.

The author is a former chief secretary of J&K and a former chairman of the Central Pollution Control Board. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.