Medicinal Plants: As a Sustainable and Innovative Solution to Combat Plastic Pollution - A Critical Review

Abstract

With the advancement of human civilization, their population and need also increased exponentially. To cope up with such overgrown requirement many temporary, cheaper and cost-effective solutions have emerged. Plastic is one of such innovation of human which initially revolutionized but later on mankind have to pay for this as plastic pollution in the form of nano-plastic in their ecosystem, food, DNA and even in their sperm. The main reason for plastic pollution is their irresponsible use and almost non-degradable nature for 20 to 500 years. This non-degradable nature of plastic causes them to remain in the ecosystem and disrupt it. These micro-plastics severely harms the aquatic and coastal ecosystem. The micro-plastic levels in different coastal and marine ecosystem ranges from 10^-3 to 140 particles/m³ in water and 0.2 to 8766 particles/m³ in sediments at different aquatic ecosystems worldwide. Micro-plastic accumulation rate in coastal and marine organism varies from 10^-1 to 15,033 counts. Medicinal plants and their products can be a reasonable and alternative solution for this hazard and this synthetic plastic can be substituted by medicinal plant’s bio-plastic which is 100% bio-degradable and eco-friendly. In this review article, authors have critically reviewed the different available research articles and tried to give a comprehensive and summarized solution for the research problem.