PLASTICS IN THE WORLD TO 2020

摘要

World changes are accelerating in the next ten years, with global vision, instantaneous communications, access to disposable income for increasing numbers, growing needs for infrastructures, housing, roads, telecoms, energy and water distribution networks. Major changes are happening in the world, in the last years of this century, and the turn of the next. We live in extraordinary times. This is not a crisis, it is a major change, long, often difficult to bear, uncertain for the three decades, 1977-2007, coming after the "Thirty glorious", very short on a historical scale. It is a change of world, of life and of pace. 1. A change of world, that has become global in less than fifteen years, with a plus, democracy winning. 2. A change of life patterns, with the coming of the telectronic world, the almost immediate access to information and other people, a novelty comparable to the new fast transportation of the last one hundred years, yet with an impact even stronger and more universal. 3. A change of pace. Europe took a century to develop, the US, fifty years, Japan, twenty five years, and the most active emerging countries now may take ten or fifteen years, from ploughs to computers, notwithstanding the recent hurdles and crises. This momentum is a major phenomenon for mankind, even more than the Renaissance or the Industrial Revolution, but immediately visible and happening much faster.