Our Hunger for SUPs Fuels Earlier Earth Overshoot Day 2021

 We have metaphorically used up the resources for 2021 as of July 29th instead of December 31st or even last year's later earth overshoot of  August 22nd as the pandemic brought emissions down as we were confined to our homes. Now as the world slowly reopens it is consuming in a greedy glut to make up for lost opportunities it seems. Earth Overshoot Day is a sad reflection of humanity's enormous ecological footprint. 

In addition to the blatant overconsumption of space-exploring billionaires, the pandemic has increased use of single-use plastics (SUPs) especially in personal protective equipment (PPE) kits, face masks and a return to the throwaway culture of plastic bags, plastic cups, plastic utensils and plastic bottles of water and beverages as we feared infection from reusing items or using alternatives to single-use. 



So, with the pandemic comes the plastic pandemic especially a SUP pandemic!

The increased price of fuel, the continuing limitations to flying to and from countries with continued COVID19 waves and infections with variants, a lot of the consumption of resources and fossil fuels - the big carbon emitters has been in the glut of production and consumption of  plastics, especially SUPs.

July is celebrated as a plastic free month in an attempt to check the use of plastic and incentivize and promote RE-plastics, yet even a simple trip out of the house, delivery of foods, a shopping trip and a walk on the beach shows that #PlasticFreeJuly is more on social media than IRL!

SUPs are everywhere and sourcing RE-plastics becomes costly and resource intensive too. Despite the many great efforts to clean-up, collect, recycle plastics and SUPs, until production stops it seems like we are shipwrecked and are trying to escape drowning in an ocean of plastic equipped only with a bucket not tools to repair the wreck.



The priority when we are over-consuming resources is to replace, reduce, recycle and reuse aggressively. 

Cut our emissions and ecological footprint by reduce the use of non-renewable and ecologically and materially costly resources, instead replacing them with materials that capture carbon and fix our emissions. 

One "renewable resource" today is plastic waste. It's building up and polluting all the elements, especially soil, water and air! We can fix the plastic and PPE waste into our construction and infrastructure replacing scare resources like sand, cement, bitumen, wood, etc. 

Roads from plastic waste: 


Furniture that upcycles plastic waste: 



Although it is still polluting, oil and heat from pyrolysis of plastic waste can be used as fuel and fix plastics and replace expensive and more polluting extracted fossil fuels. As it is recycling rather than extracting and using fossil fuels it is a means to check emissions. 

Invented to replace ivory, plastics have been over-used and misused in single-use capacity when it takes so long to decompose rather than breakdown into equally dangerous microplastics. The quick-fix in a world where we are still over-consuming scarce resources we need to up our plastic waste recycling and use it to substitute scarce resources until we can halt production of SUPs.

Masks to Bricks - Tackling trash: 


From Hyderabad:  Homes and Pavements that RE-use, RE-cycle and upcycle plastic waste: 



As we overshoot earth's bounty, the least we can do is reuse, reduce and recycle our plastic waste and replace use of fossil fuels, scarce resources, virgin plastics and SUPS with recycled and upcycled plastic waste. Removing plastic waste from ecosystems and reusing and fixing plastic pollution in construction, furniture and infrastructure is the essence of responsible production & consumption (SDG12), sustainable development and ecosystem restoration. Until we check production once and for all, this upcycling plastic waste to replace scarce resources will be a vital and responsible step to fix plastic pollution and earth overshoot. 

Comments