Our latest PLM Green Global Alliance post is a guest author contribution from Roger Franz who is a recognized authority on supply chain reporting for compliance with worldwide regulations, leveraging his decades of experience with engineering software tools and enterprise IT systems.

Previously, Roger shared his professional passion and special expertise for sustainable product design in “PLM Tools to Design for Sustainability.” His new article on plastics pollution is especially timely, given all the recent scientific papers about the widespread presence of plastics in our natural ecosystems, food sources, and no longer surprising, human bodies.

Introduction 

More than just unsightly “plastics pollution,” the volume of consumer plastics and lack of closed-loop recovery has created a significant micro-and nano-plastics problem.  These invisible plastic particles are found around the world including within animal and human tissues.  For several reasons, including a much smaller volume of plastic used in electrotechnical products compared to consumer plastics, and the generally longer life of hardware compared to the rapid turnover of consumer goods and packaging, the microplastics problem is not generally tagged as a major electronics problem – or at least not yet. Now is the time to be proactive.

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