Plastic Sustainability Challenges

The use of man-made (synthetic) plastics began in the early 20th Century and were specifically developed as cheap alternatives to expensive and/or resource restricted materials. Many of the most common polymers used today were developed by the 1950s’s, by which time they had become aggressively marketed as cheap and disposable materials. This attitude to plastics persists to the current day, and is arguably the origin of the predominant linear economy of their use.
However, these attitudes have ultimately led to the current environmental crisis associated with mismanaged plastics. To prevent further environmental impacts by moving to a position of sustainability requires many challenges to be overcome. These challenges can broadly be grouped together as technical, societal, legal, political and economic factors. This papers provides a brief overview of some of those factors and potential solutions to achieving plastics sustainability in the context of their historic use.