Raw Foundation is working to reduce the amount of oil-based plasic in the environment, by raising awareness about the true extent of plastic pollution and its impacts. These include the:

• Huge quantities of plastic which continue to grow at an alarming rate.
• Toxicity of plastic which causes widespread environmental damage and pollution across its life-cycle.
• Design of single-use plastic which promotes a throwaway consumer culture.
• Malpractice that is commonplace in the disposal and recycling of plastic.

Nothing better illustrates our throw-away lifestyle and waste problems than plastic. It is everywhere. The production, use and disposal of plastic has become one of the most serious environmental and human health problems facing us today. Here are some of the problems:

Quantity

The extent to which man-made plastics, in their relatively short history, has pervaded our lives is astonishing. It can be made into virtually anything and is practically everywhere. As a result, vast quantities of long-term plastic debris and particles can be found littering all the world’s earth and floating in all of our oceans.

Toxicity

Plastic is made from and transported by non-renewable fossil fuels (oil). It contains hundreds of highly toxic persistent chemicals, damaging to both human health and the environment. Millions of tonnes of plastic are broken down by sunlight into smaller and smaller particles that are widely dispersed in water. These attract other toxins to them to extreme levels and pass up the food chain to contaminate entire ecosystems forever.

Disposability

The short-term convenience of single-use plastic products carries a particularly inconvenient longterm truth. Explosive sales in plastic products with a short life span encourage waste, with products being dumped at an alarming rate. Design for disposability has led to a throwaway consumer culture that is supremely wasteful and environmentally destructive.

Recyclability

The majority of plastics are rarely recycled in a closed loop. Most are buried in landfills and take a minimum of 500 years to degrade, and even waste classified as recycled is mostly exported from Europe to Asia. Appropriate clean recycling and recovery systems are not keeping pace with the sheer quantity or mixture of plastic produced, releasing toxic emissions or dust into the air and soil..

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