Truly speaking, scientific research tells me that with urbanization and the population explosion, we'll certainly need more plastics. We have to make plastic.
As I said in my opening remarks, current plastic production is 400 million metric tons. It will be one billion metric tons by 2050. It's not whether plastic production will go up; it's how to manage the plastic in this world. That is the biggest issue.
Everybody talks about recycling and the properties degrading, but in another way, we must talk about the final product, as I talked about. Suppose you take recycled plastic, which is a low-value product, incorporate about 20% or 30% of that, and make composite materials by adding some fillers into that. Your final composite will be much higher in cost than even your virgin plastic. That is why this type of innovation is taking place. People are moving in that direction. That is how the world will move on.
Every product has some positive points and negative points, but fundamentally, based on science, plastic production will go on. During the Second World War there was a plastics boom. This was because of the scarcity of natural materials. People had earlier been using natural resources for all their packaging; the Second World War was the mother of invention for plastics. Since then, people have not moved back. It made life so comfortable. The problem that's happening now is around the greenhouse effect and the non-degradability.
Having said that, science is moving in really a tremendous way. Recycling technology is modifying it—