Plastic Pollution
Ik Ojo-Igbinoba
Senior Quality Assurance Advisor - Lead Auditor to OHL & UGC Projects - Implementing Integrated Management Systems. Analysing problems with Lean-Six Sigma and Deploying Assurance Audit Activities on Business Unit
As we may know it over the years, plastic is an incredibly useful material, especially in the aerospace and automotive industries and so many other processing manufacturing organisation. But it is also made from toxic compounds known to cause illness, that can caused harm to the environment in the form of air, water and land pollution, posing dangers to animals, plant life etc.
Recently, a whale that died with a stomach full of plastic (Three times the whale swam into the shallow cove on the island of Sotra) and it is not the first animal to die because of widespread plastic pollution. That tells it all about plastic pollution in our society.
Plastics can be made from a wide range of chemicals, including polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride (PVC), polyamide (nylon), polyethylene, polyethylene glycol (PEG), polypropylene and polycarbonate.
Plastic is a synthetic or semi-synthetic material which is molded and shaped when soft and then solidified. Plastics are made of organic polymers. A polymer is a long molecule made of repeating units. In chemistry, the term “organic” means that the units contain carbon.
Plastics are difficult to degradations which is why it’s one of the reasons it generate litter and a source pollution worldwide. Deteriorative reactions occur during processing, when polymers are subjected to heat, oxygen and mechanical stress etc.
Almost all types of plastics can be recycled, however the extent to which they are recycled depends upon technical, economic and logistic factors.
As a valuable and finite resource, the optimum recovery route for most plastic items at the ‘end-of-life’ is to be recycled, preferably back into a product that can then be recycled again and again and so on.
Let’s do more to end this plastic pollution by recycling what we used, deposit them at your local recycling bank. Buy plastic bottles in bulk whenever possible to reduce packaging waste. Carriers can be reused next time you’re at the shops, or deposit used ones at collection points provided by some supermarkets.