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

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

So, the ranking. Starting from the least polluting is as follows: a tissue it degrades, and therefore ends up disappearing, in a time frame between 3 and 6 months, One cigarette filter needs 2 years which become at least 5 for the cigarette butt and for the chewing gum. And here we come to the top, and most dramatic, part of the ranking: a bottle of aluminum (those of soft drinks, to be clear) may need at least 100 years to dissolve, while for a plastic bottle there might not be enough 450 years old.

Even one glass bottle, someone objects, needs to a few hundred years Too bad, though, that glass turns into sand; it doesn't pollute or 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 form the polymer break free, detaching from each other and thus becoming small fragments, the deadly microplastics. Then they float in the water and produce the shimmer that fools the fishThey think it's food, not microplastic. Once ingested by 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 took a summer tour of the American parks sent us the photo you find here, taken at the entrance of one of these wonderful places where respect for the environment is not a stentorian declamation but an authentic fact. I suggest you print this image, reproduce it in some way and spread it: in schools, in public places, in our homes.

In a very small space, let's say the surface of an Arte Povera painting, it is collected all the problem we have to deal with: how much waste is submerging us, as in the city imagined by Italo Calvino, the famous Leonia, and how much damage they cause, one by one. This image alone is enough to understand what we can all do, every day, to get out of the tunnel and take back our beauty of our community life.

It strikes us, for example, in this table, the damage caused by textile wasteOne thing we ignore. A pair of sneakers have a decomposition time of 50 to 80 years. Socks don't get thrown away before 5 years, and even the leather footwear they present biblical times to disappear: from 25 to 40 years.

At the top of the chain of misplaced waste, from a quantitative point of view, there are two objects: the cigarette butts, which have primacy, and the objects of plastic bags. On the first, there is little to add to what has recently been published in economic statistics. Despite the many anti-smoking campaigns and the bans now in place everywhere, 5,6 billion cigarettes are produced every year in the world. And there is no way to understand the damage that comes from a cigarette butt abandoned on a beach or in a garden and even on a sidewalk (who among us would throw a cigarette butt on the ground at home?). The table shows a filter composition period that varies between 10 and 12 years, and this is 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 cigarette butt in the sand, we must know that it won't disappear for a decade and therefore, in the meantime, others 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 you need to get stuck in your head. The first concerns the bottlesNote that in this case, the decomposition time is calculated as "indefinite," theoretically eternal, whereas a glass bottle would still take 1 million years to decompose. Then there's a 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 you drink something from any container, consider the data you find in the table regarding the different types of glasses. Polystyrene ones have a “indefinite” time of decomposition (like plastic bottles), paper ones disappear in 5 years, while any can (beer, Coca Cola, orange soda, etc.) takes 80-100 years to be eliminated.

At the end of this overview on sustainability, seen through the magnifying glass of the waste we produce every day, the authors launch their 3R appeal: Reduce, reuse, recycleDoes 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