Today's KNOWLEDGE Share : What if plastic disappeared tomorrow?

Today's KNOWLEDGE Share

What if plastic disappeared tomorrow? 🧠

Let’s play a game.

Poof! All plastic is gone. No flexible films. No PET. No polymers. Just… a pre-1940s world again.

Feels better, right?

Let’s see.

👕 Clothing:

Say goodbye to your gym leggings, windbreakers, and sneakers.

You’re back in cotton, wool, and linen. Lovely, but heavy, itchy, and slow to dry.

💻 Technology:

Your phone? Gone.

Laptop? Also gone.

Most cables, keys, insulation, screens, and circuit parts are plastic.

Without them, we’re basically back to telegrams.

🍅 Food packaging:

No resealable cheese packs. No sterile salad films.

Your “plastic-free” dream turns into food-waste reality.

Pre-plastic Europe lost up to 40% of perishable food before it reached consumers (FAO, 2022).

💉 Medicine:

No sterile syringes, no IV bags, no sealed pouches for instruments.

Hospitals would look more like 19th-century surgery theatres. Reusable everything, infection risk everywhere.

🚗 Transportation:

Without lightweight plastics, car weight and CO₂ emissions jump.

Forget electric vehicles. Batteries need polymer separators and connectors.

We’d be back to horses and carriages. (Hope you like the smell.)

So, what century would we land in without plastic?

Probably somewhere between 1890 and “good luck shipping fresh strawberries.”

Plastic isn’t the problem.

It’s one of the greatest inventions of modern society. We just need to manage it better. It keeps our food safe, our medicine sterile, our devices light, and our world connected.

We don’t need a world without plastic.

We need a world that’s smart enough to use it wisely.

Would you trade your phone, sneakers, car, safe food and hospital visits… for a world without plastic?

source .Miretta Soini