Human history was shaped by the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages, by holding information through materials and technologies that transformed human civilization. Plastic has become one of the materials dominating our own globalization era. Plastic particles can now be found from the highest mountains to the deepest parts of the oceans and also inside the human body. Since the end of the Second World War, our civilization has held an annual gathering in which the world's nations come together to discuss problems that increasingly cannot be addressed by individual countries alone. Established in 1945, the United Nations has become a central forum for this form of global dialogue. This week, from September 22 to 28, 2026, the 81st session of the General Assembly is being held in New York, bringing government representatives together for the annual General Debate.
Citizens from all over the world can tap into this forum using an internet-connected smart device and easily listen to these live broadcast discussions, and it wasn’t always like that. So during this time, I found myself talking to a friend, someone I have known for decades. He mentioned one leader, and I tried to describe, in simple terms such as “global warming” the broader systems crisis I believe humanity is facing, without going into its details, after he shared his own positive view of what the world might look like three hundred years from now with the advances of superintelligence. But when I argued that the subject needed to be understood more deeply, he instead focused on the expression itself, dismissing global warming as simply a hoax. So, we continued the conversation by discussing road safety and the use of bicycles as a means of transportation.
The next day, after this conversation about transportation risks, was a local holiday, and while I was reading the daily news, my attention was first drawn to a report about a man who lost his life after being struck by a vehicle while riding his bicycle. It was later reported that the driver was drunk. Next, two seemingly separate global headlines caught my attention, one reporting a high-magnitude earthquake near New Caledonia, and the second about severe flooding across Thailand. It all led me to a question about the possible connections between seemingly separate events in the context of climate change and the recently developing El Niño event.
The act of God
A few months ago, toward the end of 2025, my car was hit and damaged. I stopped to allow a young man on an electric scooter to cross the road, and a sudden impact from behind pushed my car onto the crosswalk. No one outside my car was hurt, and the machines took most of the hit after the scooter left the area. My head hit the headrest, which contains a metal structure inside the padding. It was not something anyone could really see, and since everything felt relatively normal, I decided to avoid the radiation from a scan. The physical pain was gone after a few months, but the experience stayed with me psychologically. I kept thinking about the momentum of what happened to me and the two people involved. I thought about how a difference of seconds could have made the whole situation much more complicated, and how even a crosswalk can become dangerous when environmental factors contribute to an accident, such as the bright sunlight that may have prevented the driver behind me from seeing my car in time. I’m simply grateful to God that no one around was hurt because of this accident.
When it all took place, I was relocating to a different city and was unsure whether I would need the car there, so I left it unrepaired in the parking lot throughout the summer of 2026 and eventually decided to sell it. But when I opened the damaged rear door to clear out my belongings from the car, I picked up a nylon bag that was still intact, but it simply fell apart in my hands after spending the summer exposed to sunlight. The flexible plastic had become brittle and broke down into tiny particles as the bag fell apart. Some particles fell like sand, while others floated into the air like dust. I remember thinking, “What the hell...?” It immediately reminded me of the growing scientific awareness of microplastics and PFAS.
I used to drive to the sea quite often in the summer of 2025 with that car, and I clearly remember looking at the plastic floating in the seawater, seeing dead fish washed onto the shore, and thinking about the research and warnings I had encountered over recent years. The warning signs surrounding the 2015 Paris Agreement (COP21) had turned into a visible environmental echo, reflecting concerns that had been raised for years.
Each one of us has a unique algorithm for processing information and making choices
I also remember going to the sea as a child during the 1990s. It was a very different coastline, with fewer high-rise buildings near the shore and definitely much less synthetic plastic in the surrounding environment than there is today. Even then, however, there were signs of pollution. Oil from ships could be seen in the water, and most beaches even had dedicated devices for cleaning tar from our feet. Looking back today, the change within a single generation is clear. The environment is no longer the same as it was thirty years ago.
Sometimes, it is easy to see the problems humanity is facing as something external, something that somebody with more power should solve for us. But in fact, this is a serious issue that concerns everyone. The responsibility falls on each individual and requires an understanding of the situation. Each one of us has a unique algorithm for processing information and making choices, a mind shaped by memories and the ability to focus on the problems we face. This ability gives us a choice in how we develop our worldview. We can develop a way of thinking based on ignoring the problem until it’s too late even to panic, or we can develop a disciplined focus on understanding it and working toward a solution. But first, we need to be able to grasp the information that governments around the world have produced and continue to develop as they face the global systemic crisis confronting human civilization. Understanding this information allows us to form our own overview of the situation in our minds, rather than leaving our understanding of the crisis to others. From there, we can focus on one part of this crisis: plastic, as part of our broader culture. From this point forward, we can trust in God and try to enter into a direct dialogue through whatever means we can create. But the responsibility for the path we chose in the past remains part of the reality we all face in the present.
What the Hell Is Going On?
The international effort to address the climate crisis is still relatively recent and developed through a series of historical agreements and institutions. In 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established as a global scientific body providing the data and reports on which the international agreements are based. This led in 1992 to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the foundational convention that established a framework for global cooperation to stabilize greenhouse-gas emissions, followed by the annual climate conferences (COP). In 1997, the Kyoto Protocol was signed, the first legally binding international agreement requiring developed and industrialized countries to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions, but it officially entered into force only in 2005. Understanding this timeline matters. Anyone who remembers the world before 2005 grew up in a period when the international response to climate change was still developing. This is something we must understand before we can recognize how complex the situation has become. And because this is such a profound subject, we should recognize that only since 2022 have governments also been negotiating, under the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA), a legally binding international agreement intended to address the global plastic pollution crisis by addressing the full life cycle of plastic.
Plastic: Where It All Began
Plastic emerged as a modern material in the early twentieth century and was spread around the world through Western industries. Like words such as “telephone” and “radio,” the term quickly became global, adopted by languages across the world. The word “plastic” comes from the ancient Greek plastikos (πλαστικός), meaning “capable of being shaped or molded” from the idea of forming material such as wax or clay. In English, “plastic” had been used since the sixteenth century to describe such materials that were soft and easily shaped. Even the term “plastic surgery” was coined in 1839, long before modern plastics existed, referring to the reshaping of human tissue. Only in 1909 was Leo Baekeland among the first to use the term “plastics” to describe the new class of synthetic materials being developed by him and others.
The word “plasticity” is also used in neuroscience. In 1890, the American philosopher William James used the term “plasticity” to describe behavior based on the nervous system in his book The Principles of Psychology, describing the ability of nervous tissue to change in response to external influences. In 1906, around the same time as Baekeland’s development of modern synthetic plastics, the Italian psychiatrist Ernesto Lugaro used the term in the context of changes in the structure and function of nerve cells. In 1948, the Polish neurophysiologist Jerzy Konorski coined the term “neural plasticity” to describe the brain’s ability to change through experience and learning. Now we can understand how human beings develop through a continuous process, shaped by interconnected forces within the environment around them, including the technosphere, where seemingly separate influences may be connected through a larger system of human information coded in words.
Back to the matter, the first semi-synthetic plastic was created in London in 1856 by the English chemist Alexander Parkes, who developed Parkesine from cellulose. In 1907, the Belgian-American chemist Leo Baekeland created Bakelite in New York, widely regarded as the first fully synthetic plastic, made entirely from chemical compounds rather than natural materials. Plastic began to become a widely used material in everyday life during the 1950s, particularly as a result of the Second World War.
From Material to System
The following decades brought the space race, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War, alongside rapid advances in science, industry, communications, and computing. These developments helped shape the interconnected world that would eventually become globalised as we know today. Plastic was no longer simply a substitute for natural materials; it became part of a much larger technological system that was expanding across the planet. After all, the IPCC was only established in the late 1980s, so the political framework for addressing climate change was only beginning to take shape. Looking back at this development, another question becomes difficult to avoid: was it already too late?
The main reason for inventing plastic was to find alternatives to expensive natural resources. Plastic is a material that, when force is applied to it, changes shape and remains in its new shape even after the force is removed. In this sense, plasticity describes a less energetic form of change than dynamics. Something dynamic is in constant motion, continuously changing, active and in flux. Plastic change, however, does not necessarily mean that a system remains in motion; it means that the system can respond to an external force by taking on a new form and retaining it. Plastic itself can therefore be understood as a phenomenon emerging from within a dynamic human civilization, shaped by the forces acting upon it and, in turn, becoming part of the system that created it.
Now, just think about this: consider a person who begins smoking to suppress their appetite and gradually increases the number of cigarettes they smoke each day. Or, in the opposite direction, imagine someone whose consumption of highly processed, stimulating foods gradually increases because they become part of their daily routine. In both cases, something introduced into the body becomes part of a repeated pattern that can disturb its natural balance. For a long time, the body may continue to function while absorbing the consequences of this repeated exposure. At some point, however, the accumulated damage may contribute to a sudden event such as a heart attack. The basic logic is simple: removing the harmful exposure can reduce the risk of further damage. But when the same principle is applied to an entire civilization, the scale becomes fundamentally different. If plastic has become embedded in the systems of global industry, production, consumption, and everyday life, the system may continue to function while accumulating consequences that are difficult to see as a whole. A sudden disruption of the broader system could therefore be as difficult to anticipate as a heart attack in the biosphere itself. Let’s not forget that we are living on an object moving through space, not standing outside it and observing it from a distance.
Human civilization is a dynamic supersystem that carries genetic memory from one generation to the next and preserves culture through external memory that each generation learns from its environment. But when the technosphere becomes the normal environment for a younger generation, with cities, screens, and plastic everywhere, they may forget that they are also part of the biosphere that we are putting at risk. They may even forget or completely avoid the past and mistakenly think that the solution will come from someone else rather than from themselves.
Consequences and Solutions
It’s impossible to ignore the consequences that followed the 1950s, when plastic became normal for humans, and now we can examine the results of this culture. A study published in 2025 found high concentrations of plastic in the human brain, with a massive accumulation of particles, and samples from 2024 showing plastic concentrations approximately 50% higher than those found in 2016. The most common polymer found was polyethylene, which is widely used in bags, packaging, and bottles. Higher concentrations of microplastics were also found in brain tissue from people who had been diagnosed with dementia before their deaths. People who were twenty years old in 1950 grew up during the plastic age and have spent most of their lives in it.
Therefore, our leaders are also products of this environment-based collective memory, shaped by growing up in a civilization where synthetic plastic has become part of the environment around us. Just try to imagine this structure and the way human evolution took place under the laws of nature, when fruits, leaves, and seeds could break down and travel through the air or return to the ground, while stone and metal fell faster and deeper into the ground and remained there, away from our breathing system, maintaining a natural balance. So we developed an artificial sphere with industrial systems designed to make everything faster, but we failed to notice the laws of nature. A wooden fork became metal, then plastic was added, and everything could be placed inside a colorful box. We suddenly replaced an environment made from many of these natural materials with synthetic plastic, without considering the codes of nature that kept these materials apart and in the right order.
11 million tonnes of plastic enter the world's oceans every single year
Another, simpler example is the plastic cutting board, which became common after 1950 as an alternative to traditional wooden boards. Its non-porous surface was promoted as easier to clean and less likely to retain bacteria. This is where anyone can see how plastic can move directly from the kitchen into the human body. If this information has found you, it should raise a question of personal responsibility at this point: what role do we each play in allowing products like this to become so widely accepted and sold around the world?
When the problem becomes visible, it gives us a direct opportunity to take responsibility. And yes, this is just the tip of the iceberg. From a macro perspective, the bigger picture is much harder to digest. In 2020, the FAO’s SOFIA report showed that the share of marine fish stocks fished beyond biologically sustainable limits had risen from 10% in 1974 to 34.2% in 2017. At the same time, 59.6% of assessed stocks were already being fished at the maximum sustainable level. This means that a growing share of fish stocks is being exploited at or beyond the level at which they can biologically recover. WWF also estimated that at least 40% of the global marine catch is unused, unmanaged, or lost as bycatch. According to UNEP, around 20% of the plastic in the ocean comes from fishing, shipping, and recreation, while around 80% of marine pollution originates on land. Over roughly the same period, marine populations declined dramatically, while global plastic production and consumption increased on an enormous scale. The picture is clear: marine ecosystems are being depleted while synthetic plastic continues to expand.
Despite estimates that each of us inhales tens of thousands of microplastic particles every day, approximately 8 to 11 million tonnes of plastic enter the world's oceans every single year. It takes around 400 to 800 years for plastic to break down. Sunlight and waves gradually turn it into microscopic particles, which can be carried through the atmosphere, incorporated into clouds, and returned to the surface through rain. While plastic floats and is exposed to sunlight, greenhouse gases such as methane and ethylene are also released, contributing to global warming.
The solution begins with recognizing the problem, continues by changing our habits, and ultimately brings our individual choices into alignment with the goals that governments are trying to achieve.
Conclusion.
This is all bad. Humans are not just animals; we are super predators, behaving in an artificial and sometimes completely irresponsible way. The problem starts in our culture, rooted in history and going back as far as ancient Egypt, where the foundations of this system were formed. As the cutting board example shows, it is largely a matter of a lack of sobriety, social dependence, and the failure to think critically about the systems we create. But we can use our liberty to choose between rising above the animals with the capabilities of human civilization, using advanced technologies for risk management to guide ourselves, or continuing to allow this freedom of choice to become an irreversible process that puts the entire biosphere at risk. This scale of transformation is so profound that it has even become part of the debate over how we define the geological history of Earth. Since we have only one planet, the power we have gained through globalization comes with a responsibility to understand this global systemic crisis before we reach “the point of no return” sometime before 2300.