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Plastic has become one of the most prevalent and widely used materials of the early 20th and 21st
century. Plastics are polymeric materials that can be easily shaped and molded by applying heat and or
pressure. They possess various properties such as low densities and low electrical conductivity,
transparency and toughness. These properties are the reasons why plastics have been used so diversely
in the last century (Rodriguez 2019). The first form of plastic was found in 1907 but the widespread
industrialization and rapid growth of the plastic industry did not happen until the early 1950s (Ritchie,
Roser 2020). From then to the mid-2010s, the global production of plastic was estimated to be 270
million tons while global plastic waste was 275 million tons (Jambeck et al. 2015). Although plastics may
be efficient to produce and an extremely resilient material for human usage, the environmental impacts
of plastic production and plastic usage have contributed majorly to land, marine and air pollution, all
linking to climate change. Climate change can be described as a substantial change in the climate of the
earth which lasts for extended periods of time. Climate change which causes an increase in the global
average temperature due to greenhouse gases, such as CO2 and CH4, is referred to as global warming
(Kim et al. 2010).