How will we seem to our successors on earth in the year 5000? What will remain of our civilisation long after the last plastic bag has decomposed?
It's possible that, by then, the vast digital archives reflecting our collective intellectual achievement will be lost to time because the hardware needed to display them no longer exists. What's fairly certain is that glass bottles and styrofoam will figure prominently among the tangible artefacts left by our era to be picked through by future archaeologists for clues as to how we lived.
Scientists estimate decomposition times of different materials by subjecting them to light and the busy work of microorganisms, then measuring the rate of C0₂ release as they degrade. Typical estimates for how long a banana peel takes to break down in the environment are two to five weeks, newspapers take six weeks, cigarette filters two to five years, and plastic drink bottles 450 years. For plastic bags, estimates range from 10 to 1000 years, depending on the type of plastic. But for glass bottles and styrofoam the estimates are a million years plus, which is close enough to forever.
Yes, those future sleuths may deduce that the beer bottle and the foam esky were markers of high status, because they were the items our rich civilisation created to last the longest. If that seems fanciful, consider the red figure vases of the ancient Greeks. It was assumed that the red silhouettes on black backgrounds of clay reflected a philosophically-oriented, practical, art-for-arts-sake culture in which buyers could freely mix and match their choices. But then Oxford archaeologist Michael Vickers deduced the black backgrounds were standing in for silver, and the red represented gold. What this supposedly forward-thinking, democratic pottery really showed, as fellow archaeologist Timothy Taylor explains, was poor people's aspirations to the opulent possessions of slave-owning capitalists.
How will future archaeologists asses or re-assess our culture when they realise glass bottles and styrofoam packaging were usually used just once, then thrown away?
