Getting rid of plastics entirely is highly unlikely, but also unnecessary. What we need to do is learn to stop using bad plastics and start using good plastics instead, a polymer scientist says.

Last week scientists revealed higher amounts of micro plastics in the Arctic sea ice, as well as in ocean floor sediments two kilometres below the Great Ocean Bight.

Greens Senator Peter Wilson said Australia's current recycling crisis highlights why plastics need to be removed from everyday life.

But can society function without plastics? And are there some plastics worth keeping?

Professor Anthony Ryan, a professor of physical chemistry at the University of Sheffield, said it was not plastic that was the problem, but how people chose to deal with plastic.

"Plastic's inanimate, so it can't be bad, it's what people do with it that's bad," he said.

Greens Senator Peter Wilson said Australia's current recycling crisis highlights why plastics need to be removed from everyday life. ( ABC News: Kathryn Diss )

"The reason that we have plastic leaking out of landfill and into the sea is because there's a collusion between packaging manufacturers and consumers to use single use plastic because it makes the bottom line better for producers and makes products cheaper for consumers."

Professor Ryan said until consumers gave up their addiction to convenience and said no to single use plastic, plastic providers would continue to produce it.

"It's convenience at the cheapest price," he said.

Professor Ryan said consumers need to give up their addiction to convenience and say no to single use plastics. ( Supplied: Matthew Abbott )

He said in the end it was neither the consumer nor the producer who were paying the price of collecting and recycling the waste. Instead it was the whole of society picking up the cost.

"The tragedy is that you chucked your waste into somebody else's yard," he said.

So how do we get rid of bad plastics?

Professor Ryan said regulation was needed to stop the use of "bad" plastics — that is, single use plastics.

For that to happen he said plastics producers and governments worldwide would have to come together and decide which plastics would be best used for packaging materials.

At the moment he said there was no regulation at all, so producers could use whatever packaging material they wanted.

"And often you end it with multi-layer films — so many different plastics in one film that are impossible to separate and pre-process," he said.

"They provide all sorts of benefits that you would get from having a thicker film of a single plastic that you could reuse over and over.

"I would advocate that we actually go back to the future and we return to refilling packets.

Professor Ryan urged for a bigger emphasis on reusing certain products, such as bottles. ( ABC News: Nicolas Perpitch )

"So refilling bottles and buying things loose, using packages over and over again and actually take an inconvenience in our lives in order to be kinder to the environment."

He said plastic did not have to end up sitting in landfills, and urged for a bigger emphasis on reusing certain products, such as bottles.

"In Germany they have a deposit scheme where plastic bottles are washed and refilled," he said.

"When I was a kid, glove bottles were washed and refilled — if I wanted a packet of crisps, I went and found that empty lemonade bottle, took it back to the shop, collected the deposit.

"If we gave plastic bottles, for example, economic value, then they would be collected, refilled and reused."

Because plastics are long molecules they do not mix, so nothing can be done with waste recovered from rubbish bins without a lot of labour into separating the different kinds of plastic.

Waste stockpiled ready for sorting at the Southern Metropolitan Regional Council's Canning Vale resource recovery centre. ( ABC News: Kathryn Diss )

Professor Ryan's solution was to have a standard polyethylene, PET and nylon that could be used to make bottles and boxes that could go on to be reused.

"Then there wouldn't be the leakage into the environment, because those packaging objects would have intrinsic value though the deposit scheme," he said.

A life without plastic is unlikely

Professor Ryan said to try and imagine what life would look like without plastic, you simply had to remove every item of clothing that was made from a polymer plastic case.

"Every bit of your clothing would be gone," he said.

"Even if it is made from cotton, it's made from a polymer and that polymer is called cellulose.

"And if you look inside ... the concern about finding micro plastics everywhere, they could just as easily be naturally occurring micro plastics like cellulose fibers."

He said there was a lot of confusion surrounding plastic being poisonous.

"If it lasts forever and is inert, it can't be poisonous at the same time," he said.

Professor Ryan said if someone consumed tiny pieces of plastic, then the intestines would simply do its job and clear out the waste.

"You wouldn't end up with a big pile of microbeads hanging around in your stomach," he said. "They'd get cleared like everything else gets cleaned out… like small seeds get cleared."