The Hungry Caterpillar

Even as science unmasks the sinister side of plastic, we are becoming ever more dependent on it. Is there a way out of this deadly addiction?

- Rakesh Kalshian

STELLA MCCARTNEY is an English fashion designer known for her support of animal rights. Her label assiduously eschews fur or leather. This June, she announced a line of luxury goods fashioned out of yarn spun from plastic garbage gleaned from the oceans. “To take something that is destructive and turn it into something that’s sexy and cool, how can that not be luxury?” Stella told The New York Times.

Far away from the glitz of Stella’s fashion universe, last September, a zealous 19-year-old environmental activist named Jawahar took his own life by jumping into a canal in the temple town of Thanjavur. He left behind a video recording of his suicide note: “I am sacrificing my life in the hope that it will trigger serious concern about plastic use in India. Since all of my peaceful means of protest failed, I’m forced to choose suicide...”

Two contrasting reactions to the modern pandemic of plastic pollution, one fighting, the other funereal, but both signify the Faustian nature of our toxic love affair with plastic. Obscenely cheap,magnificently protean, and addictively convenient, it has become the preeminent “lubricant of globalisation”—we now produce 20 times more plastic than 50 years ago, which is expected to double in the next 20 years.

In an everyday sense, even though we live in a virtual sea of plastic, we become conscious of it only when it is virtually immortal, ugly discards stare at us mortals from open sewers, landfills, rivers, and beaches. But it has a darker underbelly, glimpsed only occasionally through pictures and videos of poor workers recycling plastic waste in horrendous working conditions. More worryingly, the merchants of doubt hired by the plastic industry have muddied the case against plastic’s health hazards so much that most of us continue to patronise it fecklessly.