I do not deny that usage of some plastics reduces the pain of mechanical engineers a lot. However I am convinced that the plastics are the pollutants after reading too many articles about. I attached some of them to the original post. These articles are mainly UN backed articles and there are many supporting evidence and papers behind them.
For me, at least the images taken from the oceans, from the poor countries are sufficient to claim it. If you look at the wikipedia article you will not see any plastic manufacturer and developed country in the list of plastic polluters in 2010. Because they do send their polluters to the listed countries to recycle by hand, than burn some of them, and bury the leftover in the soil. As expected they cannot manage all these and most of the plastics mix with ocean water and float. Fourth article explains that burning cause toxic gases and causes problems in human health.
So the main producers of the plastics do not manage the process to recycle the plastics, therefore the plastics become pollutant in our life cycle. This is called consumerism, and freedom of the polluter societies. Same thing happens with almost everything that we use such as hand held telephones, electronics, kitchen gadgets whatever we can think of. We used to get things repaired and use again and again. Now, we throw everything since the new is cheaper, the new model is better. Let us not forget that this also cause unemployment, lose of mastering in a job in the society since the we can find fabricated things cheaper. There used to be a corner shop to shop the needs, not anymore, we have shopping centres that you can find almost anything. Some can say that nothing wrong with it. True in very short term, but not in a long term (plastic pollution is one of them, you probably are aware of the CFC that we removed from our life last 10 years and replaced all the fridges and air conditioning units).
I hope the new generations can live in a better society, free of pollutants, and with clean air.
