Unhooking the entangled web of consumer expectancy, business drivers and entrenched economic models and the role played by both big petrochemical and plastic packaging (plastics) industries on the relative inaction and avoidance of looming environmental catastrophe: Perspectives from academics, business partners and industrialists.

Research and potential product development activities, involving opportunities for patents and intellectual property have involved continuing work with academics, business partners and industrialists across three countries and lies outside of the research undertaken within the academic milieu at Brighton. Discussion over the last five years involving academics and industrialists in the UK, China and India have provided an insight into the problems facing the population of developed and developing economies. Willingness, or rather a lack of willingness to change the paradigm of business and satisfying customer demands is in part down to the companies involved and with both history and vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Whilst as a rule, new ways of working require capital investment from companies and perhaps local economies, on the flip-side, the ‘sluggish’ inactivity on the front of replacement or removal of generated single use plastic (SUP), failure to recycle plastics and convenient packing materials, such as sulphite/sulphate paper (normal paper) are very telling. Both the route to creation (refining, synthesis, treatment, etc) and the waste gases (carbon dioxide, NOx, methane, etc) generated as part of disposal of these resources (oil, coal, natural gas, plastics, paper, steel, aluminium) represent a potentially horrific portrait of future climate change and global warming (GW). Part of the responsibility for lack of change is down to consumer apathy but also largely from indolence on behalf of national and local governance and government. This lack of political direction forces companies to either persist with a current business strategy and trajectory or the stance of refusing to listen to ‘warning signs’ from scientists and the public because of lack of compulsion. In addition to global climate change (and environmental pollution with toxicants), the other very worrying development has been scientific disclosure of the persistence of microplastic fragments that have been associated with uptake in food commodity items and tenacious inclusion in the sea, air and land. These tiny fragments of potentially ‘toxic’ materials and the additive ‘poisons’ that they contain or toxicants they bind have now been found in the tissues of flora, fauna and human-kind, where they are thought to interfere with numerous essential body functions.
Keywords: compulsion, pollution, global-warming, persistence, paradigm