Topic: Recycling; Plastic

Becoming Plastic. Albert Bates. Jan. 6, 2019.


Single-use plastics a serious climate change hazard, study warns. Sandra LaVille, Guardian. May 15, 2019.

The authors say disposable plastic found in packaging and fast-moving consumer goods forms the largest and fastest-growing segment of the plastic economy.

Greenhouse gases linked to degrading plastic. Marcie Grabowski, University of Hawaii News. Aug. 1, 2018.

Mass production of plastics started nearly 70 years ago, and the production rate is expected to double over the next two decades. While serving many applications because of their durability, stability and low cost, plastics have a negative impact on the environment. Plastic is known to release a variety of chemicals during degradation, some of which negatively affect organisms and ecosystems. 

The study, published in PLOS One, reports the unexpected discovery of the universal production of greenhouse gases methane and ethylene by the most common plastics when exposed to sunlight.

More Recycling Won't Solve Plastic Pollution. Matt Wilkins, Scientific American. July 6 2018.

It’s a lie that wasteful consumers cause the problem and that changing our individual habits can fix it

The only thing worse than being lied to is not knowing you’re being lied to. It’s true that plastic pollution is a huge problem, of planetary proportions. And it’s true we could all do more to reduce our plastic footprint. The lie is that blame for the plastic problem is wasteful consumers and that changing our individual habits will fix it. 

Recycling plastic is to saving the Earth what hammering a nail is to halting a falling skyscraper. You struggle to find a place to do it and feel pleased when you succeed. But your effort is wholly inadequate and distracts from the real problem of why the building is collapsing in the first place. The real problem is that single-use plastic—the very idea of producing plastic items like grocery bags, which we use for an average of 12 minutes but can persist in the environment for half a millennium—is an incredibly reckless abuse of technology. Encouraging individuals to recycle more will never solve the problem of a massive production of single-use plastic that should have been avoided in the first place. 

As an ecologist and evolutionary biologist, I have had a disturbing window into the accumulating literature on the hazards of plastic pollution. Scientists have long recognized that plastics biodegrade slowly, if at all, and pose multiple threats to wildlife through entanglement and consumption. More recent reports highlight dangers posed by absorption of toxic chemicals in the water and by plastic odors that mimic some species’ natural food.

Plastics also accumulate up the food chain, and studies now show that we are likely ingesting it ourselves in seafood. If we consumers are to blame, how is it possible that we fail to react when a study reports that there will be more plastic than fish in the oceans by 2050? I would argue the simple answer is that it is hard. And the reason why it is hard has an interesting history. 

Beginning in the 1950s, big beverage companies like Coca-Cola and Anheuser-Busch, along with Phillip Morris and others, formed a non-profit called Keep America Beautiful. Its mission is/was to educate and encourage environmental stewardship in the public. Joining forces with the Ad Council (the public service announcement geniuses behind Smokey the Bear and McGruff the Crime Dog), one of their first and most lasting impacts was bringing “litterbug” into the American lexiconthrough their marketing campaigns against thoughtless individuals. 

Two decades later, their “Crying Indian” PSA, would become hugely influential for the U.S. environmental movement. In the ad, a Native American man canoes up to a highway, where a motorist tosses a bag of trash. The camera pans up to show a tear rolling down the man’s cheek. By tapping into a shared national guilt for the history of mistreatment of Native Americans and the sins of a throwaway society, the PSA became a powerful symbol to motivate behavioral change. More recently, the Ad Council and Keep America Beautiful teams produced the “I Want to Be Recycled” campaign, which urges consumers to imagine the reincarnation of shampoo bottles and boxes, following the collection and processing of materials to the remolding of the next generation of products. 

At face value, these efforts seem benevolent, but they obscure the real problem, which is the role that corporate polluters play in the plastic problem. This clever misdirection has led journalist and author Heather Rogers to describe Keep America Beautiful as the first corporate greenwashing front, as it has helped shift the public focus to consumer recycling behavior and actively thwarted legislation that would increase extended producer responsibility for waste management.

Everything you've been told about plastic is wrong – the answer isn't recycling. Sirena Bergman, The Independent. Sep. 22, 2018.

Recycling is an easy cop-out for governments and large corporations, but the truth is that we have to take very different action if we want to stop irreversibly poisoning the planet

... 

Recycling is the grown-up version of squeezing our eyes shut, sticking our fingers in our ears and shouting “lalalalalala!”.

The Fabrics of Society. Albert Bates. Dec. 23, 2018.

Fashion, unlike many other aspects of the plastic problem, is something consumers can change both thoroughly and rapidly. Besides producing and buying fabrics that last longer and can be recycled, they can purchase clothing made from organically-produced materials that naturally biodegrade, such as cotton, silk, linen, and wool. They can wash only when the clothes, especially outerwear, absolutely require it. They also have to be aware, when they are buying, not to purchase blends. Many fabrics can be recycled, even acrylics, but if it requires the entire structure be disassembled, thread by thread, remanufacturers may shy away.

Petroplastic fabrics are something we can, and must, refuse. Surely we can replace these with safer, healthier bio-based and biodegradable natural analogs?

The Arithmetic of Plastic. Albert Bates. Nov. 25, 2018.

Isn’t it time we asked why we design a material to last forever and then put that into objects intended to be discarded after a single use?

'Life Without Plastic: The Practical Step-by-Step Guide to Avoiding Plastic to Keep Your Family and the Planet Healthy' (book review). Katherine Martinko, treehugger. Oct. 11, 2018


Drinks bottles now biggest plastic menace for waterways – report. Fiona Harvey, Guardian. Apr. 8, 2019.

Plastic bottles, the detritus of our throwaway water and soft drinks habits, are the most prevalent form of plastic pollution in European waterways, according to a new report.

Food wrappers, including crisp and sweet packets, were the second biggest form of plastic pollution in rivers, followed by cigarette butts. All of these forms of litter can cause problems for wildlife and fish, and are hard to clean up once they have found their way into the water.

Plastic bags were found to make up only 1% of plastic rubbish in freshwater, reflecting years of efforts to reduce their use

Marine plastic pollution costs the world up to $2.5tn a year, researchers find. Kate Hodal, Guardian. Apr. 4, 2019.

Scientists warn that social and economic price of plastic waste to global society has been underestimated

referencing scientific research article:
Global ecological, social and economic impacts of marine plastic. Nicola Beaumont et al, Marine Pollution Bulletin.


Seabirds Are Pooping Out Plastic. Cheryl Katz, Hakai. July 25, 2018.

Plastics, those indestructible relics of our throwaway culture, are omnipresent in the oceans, making their way into everything from sea salt to seabirds. Now, a new study finds seabirds may be giving back, shuttling particles from ocean garbage gyres back to shore in their poop. Around colonies where seabirds congregate, the pungent white streaks may form halos of plastic pollution—contaminating soil and potentially cycling back into the sea. 

The study, conducted on northern fulmars in the frigid waters off Canada’s Labrador Peninsula, is the first to measure plastics in seabird guano. The idea arose when a group of researchers studying plastic ingestion by seabirds were having coffee and pondering where the junk they found stuffing birds’ stomachs might ultimately wind up. 

“We thought, let’s take a look in there and see what we find at the end of their gastrointestinal tract,” says Jennifer Provencher, a marine ecologist at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, and lead author on the paper. 

Local Inuit hunters collected 30 of the stocky gull-like seabirds, which nest by the tens of thousands in the rocky cliffs of Baffin Island, Nunavut. The researchers dissected the birds’ stomachs and intestinal tracts. What they found was eye-opening. 

“Almost all of the birds had plastics in their stomachs,” Provencher says. “Half had microplastics in their poop.”

The world’s oceans and all marine life are on the brink of total collapse. James Bradley, The Monthly. Aug. 2018.

In recent years, however, concern about oil spills has been overtaken by growing alarm about the impact of plastic upon marine environments. Humans have produced 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic since mass production of it began in the early 1950s, a figure that continues to rise vertiginously year by year: a staggering 335 million metric tonnes is estimated to have been created in 2016 alone. Able to be produced so cheaply that recycling is rarely economic, most plastic ends up in incinerators and landfill. The rest leaks out into the environment, with at least 8 million tonnes a year washing into the oceans.

...

Lavers has been studying plastic pollution for much of her career. Yet what she saw when she arrived on Henderson Island shocked even her. “I know plastic is ubiquitous. It’s found from the Arctic to the Antarctic and everywhere in between, so I don’t go anywhere without expecting to find it. Yet every now and then I arrive somewhere I’m caught off guard. Henderson is one of the most remote islands in the world, it’s one of only a handful of raised coral atolls in the world, it’s World Heritage listed, it’s surrounded by one of the largest marine protected areas in the world. And yet there laid out in front of me was a concentration of plastic unlike anything I’d ever seen.” 

Lavers and her team calculated there were 17.6 tonnes of plastic littering Henderson’s beaches with an average of more than 670 individual pieces per square metre. Of this, most was lying on the surface or buried in the first 10 centimetres of sand. And these amounts were increasing all the time: a survey of a 10-metre stretch of the island’s north beach found new pieces of plastic washing up every day. Yet as Lavers points out, the 17.6 tonnes of plastic she and her team found on Henderson constitutes less than two seconds of the annual global production of plastic, and only a tiny proportion of the estimated five trillion pieces of plastic believed to be floating in the ocean. 

One does not have to look far for examples of the toll plastic exacts upon ocean wildlife: birds, fish, whales and other marine animals are all vulnerable to entanglement. Likewise, studies of turtles, seals, dolphins and birds suggest tens of thousands perish every year from swallowing plastics. On Midway Atoll, in the North Pacific, up to a third of albatross chicks die every year, many of them starving to death after being fed plastic refuse that their parents have mistaken for food. American photographer Chris Jordan’s images of their bedraggled corpses, rotting bellies distended with plastic caps and other refuse, provide a mutely eloquent testament to the effects of this process.

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