 Hi, my name is Aristide from Metabolism of Cities and in this video we're going to discuss why tackling plastic pollution might not be the best idea. So I know what you're going to say, wait, plastic pollution is not a good idea, that's total nonsense, right? Well I just want to provide some more contextual elements and I'm not saying plastic pollution is something we should not tackle but there are some caveats to this. So first of all plastic pollution, well it's, you know, these are strong images that we have in our minds now, it's a lot of plastics in rivers and seas, plastics with, you know, around the necks of marine animals, it's micro plastics that we now find within the stomach of animals. So clearly, you know, it's a huge problem, we see them everywhere and we have more and more plastics in everything, so in, around our foods, within the construction sector. So it's material that has been cheap, that has been light and that really enables a number of things but we've got too many of it and we can see it a bit everywhere today. Now why do I say it's perhaps not something we should tackle or perhaps I should better say it's badly tackled today? Well except from this, well, attention from media and therefore to people because there are so many other issues that the media have not picked up whereas they're as important as it, which is from how animals are treated, from, you know, deforestation to the extinction of species, so there are just numerous and numerous environmental challenges that do not get at the same level as plastic pollution whereas they're at least if not more important than it. So this is because there are some very strong images related to plastic pollution. The second element why I say tackling plastic pollution might not be a good idea is the solutions that are brought to us today. And you're going to say again, wait, there are more and more actions against plastics and single-use plastics, lately a number of countries around the world and the EU are pushing very hard towards measures against single-use plastics but in my point of view there are two main things that are carried out very wrongly. First of all, let's imagine straws for instance. You know, a lot of us grew up with plastic straws and today there are going to be bands and that's a great thing but the alternatives I'm not that happy about because the alternatives might be inox straw. In terms of resources, you probably need, I don't know how many thousand plastic straws to get to the same level as an inox straw. And I don't favor again the plastic pollution but what I'm saying is that a number of solutions are just more, require more resources and might produce more waste than what we think, at least if we look at the entire supply chain. This is one thing. The second thing is that I feel that instead of banning single-use plastics, we're just, well, we are doing that but we're just opening up a door towards other materials and towards other consumption. So instead of saying we ban all single-use materials, that would have been a great opportunity to do that. No, we say well use biodegradable, use other stuff. Well using other stuff meaning that other people are going to create just more products and I feel that we're just postponing the problem from plastics to other materials. And this is especially true for all of the biodegradable plastics which we thought was a great idea but finally it might not be that good of an idea in terms of biodegradable within composting and all of that that does not work as well as we thought. And you know, I really think that tackling waste, well tackling plastic pollution today is just postponing the problem with other materials and with other measures that we could have taken today. All in all I think that, well of course I'm happy with where this is going, more and more people are aware about this problem and want to have a solution but I just want to say that just going towards other non-renewable materials and resource-intensive materials is not the best idea and when we start doing policies about banning some types of materials perhaps the greatest idea would be to go to the root of the problem rather than fixing the symptoms. So instead of having an end-of-pipe solution which is changing the material of your straw perhaps say you don't need to use straws from now on. That's it for now, please let me know what you think. It might be a bold statement that it's not interesting to tackle plastic pollution but you might have other suggestions, please let us know in the comments. Cheers!