My Plastic Life

Journalist Lucy Siegle has spent the past 10 years investigating the impact plastic has on our lives. In this extract from her new book, Turning The Tide On Plastic, she shares the collective burden that it places on us all.

“EVERYWHERE WE HAVE LOOKED, WE HAVE NOW FOUND PLASTIC,” Professor Richard Thompson told me on my visit to his International Marine Litter Research Unit laboratory at Plymouth University in the UK. It’s a statement that continues to haunt me. Microplastics have been found on beaches from the Atlantic to Antarctica. They’ve even been found in the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the world’s oceans.

Over the past 20 years we have truly been plumbing new depths, in the form of submersibles and remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs, that crawl along the deepest trenches of the ocean and record what’s going on in this incredible universe 11,000 metres below. This has changed our thinking. We now know that the Abyssal and Hadal zones of the world’s oceans are not the cold, dead zones that they were once imagined to be, but biodiverse ecosystems, home to coral and hosts of living organisms. At this depth, life is slow: it takes a lot of time for plants and animals to grow and replenish. Contaminants in the form of plastic pollution cry disaster for this delicate ecosystem.

Over the past few years, I’ve been on what can only be described as an epic plastic adventure. I wanted to discover the extent of plastic’s grip on our home lives, but also on commerce and in culture, and to understand its environmental impact and the implications for future generations. I’ve interviewed plastics apologists, deniers, enthusiasts and lovers. Among them, plastic is often referred to as the “skin of commerce” – the implication being that whatever the downsides, we can’t get by without it.