From the plastics that make up much of the computer I am typing this letter on, to the wireless router in another room, the shielding on the cable that connects my house to the world wide web, my ability to exchange ideas with the whole world would be impossible without plastics.
Plastics are widely used in medicine to make surgeries better and safer, to keep hospitals cleaner, to make sure medicines from the pharmacy are safer, and as above, to enable to vast network of knowledge and communications used in modern medicine. Our health depends on plastics.
Our food supply is greatly enhanced through the use of plastics in agricultural equipment, in the processes of harvesting, processing, shipping, and packaging of foods to keep them safe, fresh, cheap and convenient. I just had a glass of milk and a slice of toast with margarine and honey made from bread I made yesterday in my breadmaker. A substantial part of the breadmaker is plastic, my margarine and honey was safely sold to me in a plastic container, I kept my bread in a super-handy plastic ziploc bag, my glass of milk was safely and cheaply delivered in a plastic bag made with maybe a tablespoon of plastic and was kept cool and safe in a fridge made with lots of plastic.
It is easy to take for granted the hundred or thousand plastic items all around my house that improve my life every day. Plastics improve my clothes, transportation, education, climate, comfort, food, entertainment, safety and everything else these days. What a wonderful, human, life-promoting, innovative, adaptable, material! I an indebted to the great businesses that make this possible.
It is a myth that there are "vast ocean islands of plastic." Such areas naturally occur due to the mechanics of ocean circulation, but the plastic density there is more like flecks of pepper in your soup rather than an island. If there was an actual island then clever businesses could take a boat over there and collect it for large profits - and this would be good, but the fact is this is not possible.
Mr. Schiller says plastic bottles end up in the environment, as if the materials they are made from did not originate in the environment. The environment is not suffering since it is not a conscious being. In fact, my environment has been improving from the day I was born due to continuing advances in technology by entrepreneurs and industrialists. When societies rise from their primitive, collectivist, pre-industrial state to a more free, wealthier, life-promoting, more capitalist one, there are by-products of industrialization that may be identified as pollution by those in more advanced societies because we have already passed the top of the inverted-U shape normally found during development. As a society produces more wealth, pollution rises yet quality of life rises fast. Once a certain level of wealth is achieved people can afford to take greater care and pollution falls. This is a basic economic principle.
A call for the elimination of plastic bottles through political means is a move towards dictatorship. When I, a living, thinking, reasoning and relatively free human being have decided to buy water in a safe, portable and inexpensive plastic bottle, by what right does anyone else forbid me to do so? Who is to decide if the bottle is needed if not the individual buying it? You? What if I refuse to follow your command? By making this a political issue you are asking for the power of the gun (the only power politics provides) to be used against me and/or those who so helpfully produced it and sold it to me. Is this the right way for reasoning beings to live - taking away water bottles from fellow human beings at gunpoint? If you wish to deal with me as a human being, use reason, education and persuasion to show me a way that I can see is better for my life and don't threaten me with government-enforced bans.
