How much does it take for each piece of waste to degrade?

Who knows, perhaps if each of us knew the degradation times of each waste , we'd be more careful before committing the crime of abandoning a plastic bottle on the beach, or in the sea . And perhaps we wouldn't have 72 billion cigarette butts thrown away every year, 40 percent of which end up polluting the sea and beaches.

So, the ranking. Starting with the least polluting, it's as follows: a paper tissue degrades, and therefore disappears, in a time span of between 3 and 6 months ; a cigarette filter needs 2 years , which becomes at least 5 for a cigarette butt or chewing gum. And here we come to the highest, and most dramatic, part of the ranking: an aluminum bottle (the kind used for soft drinks, to be clear) can take at least 100 years to dissolve, while a plastic bottle might not even take 450 years.

Even a glass bottle , some might argue, takes a few hundred years to dissolve. Unfortunately, glass turns to sand, doesn't pollute, and doesn't leave residues that end up on our tables, unlike plastic and those deadly bottles.

Source: The sailors' newspaper

Once the plastic bottle has degraded and dissolved into the environment, its pollution effects are far from over. Indeed, they become more subtle and insidious.

What happens? The molecules that make up the polymer break free, unbinding from one another and becoming small fragments, the deadly microplastics . They then float in the water and produce a shimmering light that fools fish : they think it's food, not microplastic. Once ingested by the fish, the plastic fragment remains in their stomachs, and we eat it when those fish end up on our table. Perhaps with the exquisite flavor of good Mediterranean cuisine.

A friend who toured American parks this summer sent us the photo you see here, taken at the entrance to one of these wonderful places where respect for the environment isn't just a pompous proclamation but a genuine fact. I suggest you print this image, reproduce it somehow, and spread it around: in schools , in public places, in our homes.

In a very small space, say the surface of an Arte Povera painting, the entire problem we must deal with is captured : how much waste is overwhelming us, as in the city imagined by Italo Calvino , the famous Leonia , and how much damage it causes, one by one. This image alone is enough to understand what we can all do, every day, to escape the tunnel and reclaim the beauty of our community life.

For example, in this table, we're struck by the damage caused by textile waste . Something we're unaware of. A pair of sneakers takes 50 to 80 years to decompose. Socks don't last for five years, and even leather shoes take a biblical amount of time to decompose: 25 to 40 years.

At the top of the chain of misplaced waste, quantitatively, are two objects: cigarette butts , which take the lead, and plastic objects . Regarding the former, there's little to add to the recent economic statistics. Despite numerous anti-smoking campaigns and widespread bans, 5,6 billion cigarettes are produced worldwide every year. And there's no way to explain the damage caused by a single cigarette butt left on a beach , in a garden, or even on a sidewalk (who among us would throw a cigarette butt on the ground at home?). The table shows a filter composition period of between 10 and 12 years, due to the fact that these filters are made of cellulose acetate, a particular type of plastic. Now, if we scratch a beach by sticking our butt in the sand, we should know that it won't disappear for a decade, and therefore, in the meantime, more will arrive. And the integrity of the beach is definitively compromised.

And now we come to plastic. There are two images on the sign that need to be fixed in our minds. The first concerns bottles : note that in this case, the decomposition time is calculated as "indefinite," theoretically eternal, whereas a glass bottle still takes a million years to disappear. Then there's the photo of six plastic rings, leftovers from packaging, the kind that haunt us every time we make a purchase, even the most trivial. Well, in this case, the decomposition time is 450 years . More than four centuries.

Finally, when drinking from any container, consider the data in the table for different types of cups. Styrofoam cups have an "indefinite" decomposition time (like plastic bottles), paper cups disappear in 5 years, while any can (beer, Coke, orange soda, etc.) takes 80-100 years to decompose.

At the end of this overview of sustainability, seen through the magnifying glass of the waste we produce every day, the authors launch their appeal for the 3 Rs: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle . Does this seem like a difficult program to implement?

Read also:

• Where do you throw away polystyrene?
• How to reduce packaging: 10 tips
• How to recycle glass