6 Minute English / Can we live without plastic?

Note: This is not a word-for-word transcript.

Hello. This is 6 Minute English from BBC Learning English. I m Neil.

And I m Beth. Plastic is fantastic! This phrase was used a lot in the 1950s when mass- produced plastic items started to become part of our everyday lives. The following decades saw a revolution as plastic became the most commonly used material in modern life, found in everything from cars to furniture to packaging. Take a quick look around and you ll soon see how many everyday items contain plastic.

But now our love of plastic is being questioned, mostly thanks to climate change and pollution caused by single-use plastics plastic products which are designed to be used just once before being thrown away. 11 million tonnes of plastic waste are dumped into our oceans every year. It s believed that single-use plastics make up 40% of all plastic pollution globally.

What s more, it s not just land and water being polluted tiny plastic pieces known as microbeads have even been found inside the human body, and can be passed from mother to child through breast milk. And because plastic comes from fossil fuels, the process of making it creates problems at every stage, from burning coal, to transportation, to recycling. In this programme, we ll be asking: is it time to live without plastic? And, as usual, we ll be learning some useful new vocabulary as well.

But first I have a question for you, Beth. One reason why plastic became so popular is that it s a very flexible material. It can be formed into different shapes, making it useful for keeping food fresh, or holding liquid. Originally, plastic was invented to replace the decreasing supply of natural materials like metal, wood and glass. So which items did plastic first replace? Was it:

a) snooker balls?b) shopping bags? or,c) hairbrushes?

Hmm, I guess the first thing to be made of plastic was a hairbrush.

OK, Beth, I ll reveal the answer later in the programme. Dr Sherri Mason is Professor of Chemistry at Penn State University in the US, and a specialist in plastic pollution. Her award-winning 2017 research into microplastics in rivers led to the US Congress banning microbeads. Here, she explains the problem of plastics to BBC World Service programme, The Real Story:

Dr Sherri MasonPlastic is synthetic and, as a consequence of that, nature doesn't really know what to do with it. Like, a paper bag that's sitting on the side of the road - it's unsightly but within weeks there are organisms in the soil that can use that paper bag as a food source, right they have evolved to basically chew up that paper bag and turn it back into soil, turn it back into carbon and nitrogen and oxygen. But with regard to plastic because it is a synthetic material you don't have that evolution. There are some organisms that can use it as a food source, but they're few and far between, especially when you're talking about water systems, aquatic systems and the temperatures that exist, and so they can't really use it as a food source so plastic doesn't biodegrade