Miracle Material

Thyme flowering

Water pipes. Drainage pipes. Hosepipes. Compost toilet (a.k.a. a wheelie bin). Polytunnel skin. Plant pots and modules. Watering trays. Watering can. Wheelbarrow. Water butt. Water barrel. Sheets to keep weeds down on paths. Sheet to help keep rain off the firewood. Tarps to keep other things dry. Transparent bags to keep my produce fresh in. Outdoor chairs. Base of the greenhouse. Handles of tools. Crates to carry veg around in. Buckets. Shopping bags. Food packaging. Toiletries packaging. Water bottles. Parts of the caravan, car, computer and mobile phone.

Any guesses on what links all the items in this long and tiresome-to-read list?

Sweetcorn just keeps growing taller

You got it. (Did you?) They're just some of the items I own that are made of or contain some form of plastic. It's the miracle material that since its conception in the mid-19th century has become absolutely ubiquitous. Imagine life without it. It must be possible - humans seem to have managed for most of our existence with wood, metal and stone. But once someone figured out how to make that black stuff that spurted out of the ground into a lightweight solid that could be fashioned and fixed into any shape, there was no looking back.

A frog loitering outside my polytunnel

It's even getting to places where you can't even detect it. The cosmetics industry in their wisdom have begun to impregnate their products with tiny microbeads of plastic, no doubt because customers everywhere have been clamouring for such a new ingredient in their toothpaste. But the thing we all know about plastic is it does not break down naturally. Billions of microbeads disappear down the plughole and end up in the sea where they end up in the bellies of the descendants of the marine life that died millions of years ago eventually to form the oil that was used to make the damn things. The US and other countries have banned them, but so far it's still legal here.

Some of this week's harvest - cabbage, turnip, broad beans and kohl rabi

Oil is nothing if not versatile. And, unfortunately, finite. The world is aware that burning it as a fuel is a major contributor to climate change hence the efforts to switch to greener alternatives (except for the British government which has increased subsidies to oil and gas companies thus inviting the politely-worded wrath of the UN's Climate Change Envoy this week). But I am not aware if anyone is giving any serious attention to the problem of what to make stuff out of when oil wells eventually run dry. Perhaps they'll invent a plastic that never perishes so we won't need to make any more things but just pass on our possessions from generation to generation. This wouldn't work under capitalism of course. Time to reinvent our global economic practice and brush up on our metal-working skills while we're at it?

A useful plastic cover for my warmth-seeking vegetables