The fossil fuel industry has known for decades that recycling alone won't solve the plastic crisis. But it's spending millions to convince the public otherwise.
"One study estimates that each person ingests up to one credit card worth of plastic each week."
This reminds me a lot of a comparison that was made when I was in high school: walking in the streets and breathing the air of downtown Muskegon, Michigan (a few miles north of me) is equivalent to smoking 2 packs of cigarettes a day. This was because at the time there were three large foundries, one large paper mill, a coal-fired power plant, and various other heavily polluting industries in the city.
Today the foundries, paper mill and power plant are gone. Breathing the air these days is quite refreshing - the state's motto is "Pure Michigan."
Change can happen - with air pollution, and with plastics. But major changes do not occur by individuals changing their habits. Things change, as you pointed out, as the result of government mandates, like the Clean Air Act. When the actual costs of polluting are placed where they belong - on the companies doing the polluting - instead of on society as a whole, then the cost of polluting becomes prohibitive, and businesses either stop polluting or close down.
Just enraging. I’ve known about this for a while but your in-depth reporting goes even further. The images from internal memos are very effective. Maybe plastic is to our civilization as lead was to the Romans. Thanks for shining light on this.
“Recycling is not always the best option as it does not always effect [sic] greatest environmental gain,” explained the European Vinyls Corporation in 1993.
The word "effect" doesn't require a "[sic]" in that context, as "effect" can be a verb meaning "to cause to come into being."
The biggest problem is public awareness. Everyone thinks the recycling program is working. That's the problem. The media blitz's work all to well. Now we need a government media blitz to turn it around the other way. But the government in the U.S. is too busy with elections right now to think about that, along with mainstream media. It will take a major media undertaking to turn public opinion away from where it lies now. What can we do?
I'm fine with sending a fair bit of plastics to the landfills. It's a small part of the waste stream, doesn't turn into methane like paper or food waste. It's our only functional large-scale form of carbon "sequestration." Of the plastic waste in the oceans, the major fractions appear to come form a few countries which don't even have functional trash collection (e.g. the Philippines) and from the fishing industry. As far as GHGe pollution from production, it seems like a toss up with all but the very best, and kinda rare, substitutes. A lot of that could be eliminated from all production.
Microplastics in US waters and air seem to come from the wear of things like "geo-textiles," plastic "mulch" or weed barriers, pavement markings, paint, etc., and tire wear particles. The puppy video in the last article seemed to show a frisky pup romping on plastic weed barrier used in a community garden, each step probably grinding off a bit of plastic to eventually run off into the creek or leach into the produce.
Incredible reporting Arielle! The main thing I take away is that we need a genuine, well regulated, probably government owned and operated recycling infrastructure for all forms of waste to create a truly circular economy. Something I hope the climate crisis is making clear for all of society, is that we can't keep dumping waste of whatever type into the environment, no matter how much we produce, and expecting no negative consequences.
Reducing production and consumption is extremely important, but even if we cut that by 90% or something, there should be a guarantee that the 10% that is produced and consumed never enters the environment. And for me, I'm super interested in e-waste and tackling that problem. And in that area a lot is discussed about right to repair reducing the production part of the problem. But we create so many electronics I question the actual dent in production we make if still make 10s of millions of tons of waste.
Not that I'm overly concerned or anything, but in my experience talking about genuine recycling can be seen as giving a pass for companies and their issues like you mentioned and deflecting from reducing production, when that isn't the intention at all.
Kind of a weird comment maybe, but from the conversations I have had with others their headspace seems to be more focused on what they can do to reduce production and consumption while my headspace is more what can I do to make it possible so that my neighbor or whoever can dispose of any type of waste and I know it will end up back in some new product or truly disposed of. Just a difference I noticed, but both are required.
From pesticides to agent Orange their market plan always was single use, then throw away. The throw away never concerned as to where. Landfills are filling up, oceanic gyres concentrate floating plastic stuff but provide little room for living things. The plastics physically breakdown into particles that can plug up living processes choke and strangle but, the greed that drives all this cannot care one wit.
Agreed …. that we need to stop the throwaway consumer lifestyle. and not just on plastics.
Here are some key points for the future...
I don’t think we should be blaming the related industries (Oil and plastics producers) as they are reacting to what government are asking them to do. …
Plastics are an essential material element in our future products and going backwards without such materials will be impossible.
What we need to do is apply “sustainability thinking” to our whole economy.
We do need to make mine and grow much more of what we consume in a short and localized supply chain economy so we can have more of a circular economy, so that we can recycle, reuse, re-purpose, reclaim and mainly avoid throwing away any materials we dig out of the ground or grow and process for our use.
Our land fill sites are a direct measure of the waste as it relates to the cost of potential pollution by allowing this to happen.
Not sure that plastic is a huge problem in the Oceans but its certainly something to work on as with land as well.
We have enough regulations, and we just need to ensure they are enforced. But eliminating our industries and jobs and then our prosperity with over-indulgence in unrealistic advocacy action is not the solution, and just wont work.
There are some technological alternatives to meet cost, quality and environmental balance, but they need to be planned correctly and it means working with the industrial players as partners in our economic future, not framing them as the enemy!
Another point…. Pollution is always a worthy cause but must not to be confused with the pointless mitigation of CO2 and the futile effort to attack climate change.
We need to accept the definitive need for the ongoing need for fossil fuels to support our modern prosperity, and they will be essential to support any adaption to a naturally warming planet.
Any notion that fossil fuels can be quickly displaced with other technologies is unrealistic, foolish and irresponsible.
Forget NetZero… its not going to happen in Canada.
Here is an article that is just about where most of our voters are now…
We will be changing governments and going back to normal and sound reason soon.
Joe Oliver: Liberals need to ditch Steven Guilbeault’s radical activism (msn.com)
I didn't see anything at the linked website documenting that plastics pollution was "on par" with climate change. The mass of plastic stuff we dump in the ocean is 1/3000th the mass of co2 we put in the air. There's a lot of discussion of the fact that all of us now eat detectable amounts of plastic, but not a lot of evidence presented that that's a big deal (cancer deaths are going down over the past few decades, for example). I'm not arguing that plastic pollution isn't bad - but if you're going to say things like this, can you please provide a metric? I would assume "on par" means, likely to cause a similar amount of harm. So please say what you mean by that.
I always thought this was an interesting read on plastics and recycling, and how we need to be careful how the data is presented. Even though this is at a publication owned by APR, it does take someone thru some of the facts and figures that most do not deep dive into. Are they credible? I am not sure. But I also face local commentary that say everything in your recycling bin goes to a landfill, so why are we spending money on it?
Because the fact is, it doesn’t all go to a landfill. Otherwise, why would MRF’s be spending billions of dollars in the capital equipment to sort all this stuff? Just to fool the public for appearances? C’mon.
And for that reason, sometimes I am a bit skeptical on the fraud claims. Not because I don’t think we need to dramatically reduce plastic, but because every time I am in a store, I see it EVERYWHERE. I don’t think it is very pragmatic to eliminate it anytime soon. So while we are working on better, more sustainable alternatives, we’d better figure out how to best handle the waste.
Little did we know what we were unleashing when we watched as Dustin Hoffman's character in "The Graduate" get told that the future was "Plastics".
"One study estimates that each person ingests up to one credit card worth of plastic each week."
This reminds me a lot of a comparison that was made when I was in high school: walking in the streets and breathing the air of downtown Muskegon, Michigan (a few miles north of me) is equivalent to smoking 2 packs of cigarettes a day. This was because at the time there were three large foundries, one large paper mill, a coal-fired power plant, and various other heavily polluting industries in the city.
Today the foundries, paper mill and power plant are gone. Breathing the air these days is quite refreshing - the state's motto is "Pure Michigan."
Change can happen - with air pollution, and with plastics. But major changes do not occur by individuals changing their habits. Things change, as you pointed out, as the result of government mandates, like the Clean Air Act. When the actual costs of polluting are placed where they belong - on the companies doing the polluting - instead of on society as a whole, then the cost of polluting becomes prohibitive, and businesses either stop polluting or close down.
Just enraging. I’ve known about this for a while but your in-depth reporting goes even further. The images from internal memos are very effective. Maybe plastic is to our civilization as lead was to the Romans. Thanks for shining light on this.
This makes my skin crawl - so much deception.
Who's going to make a movie about this deception and call it something like "The Greatest Lie Ever Told"?
“Recycling is not always the best option as it does not always effect [sic] greatest environmental gain,” explained the European Vinyls Corporation in 1993.
The word "effect" doesn't require a "[sic]" in that context, as "effect" can be a verb meaning "to cause to come into being."
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/effect#dictionary-entry-2
The biggest problem is public awareness. Everyone thinks the recycling program is working. That's the problem. The media blitz's work all to well. Now we need a government media blitz to turn it around the other way. But the government in the U.S. is too busy with elections right now to think about that, along with mainstream media. It will take a major media undertaking to turn public opinion away from where it lies now. What can we do?
I'm fine with sending a fair bit of plastics to the landfills. It's a small part of the waste stream, doesn't turn into methane like paper or food waste. It's our only functional large-scale form of carbon "sequestration." Of the plastic waste in the oceans, the major fractions appear to come form a few countries which don't even have functional trash collection (e.g. the Philippines) and from the fishing industry. As far as GHGe pollution from production, it seems like a toss up with all but the very best, and kinda rare, substitutes. A lot of that could be eliminated from all production.
Microplastics in US waters and air seem to come from the wear of things like "geo-textiles," plastic "mulch" or weed barriers, pavement markings, paint, etc., and tire wear particles. The puppy video in the last article seemed to show a frisky pup romping on plastic weed barrier used in a community garden, each step probably grinding off a bit of plastic to eventually run off into the creek or leach into the produce.
Incredible reporting Arielle! The main thing I take away is that we need a genuine, well regulated, probably government owned and operated recycling infrastructure for all forms of waste to create a truly circular economy. Something I hope the climate crisis is making clear for all of society, is that we can't keep dumping waste of whatever type into the environment, no matter how much we produce, and expecting no negative consequences.
Reducing production and consumption is extremely important, but even if we cut that by 90% or something, there should be a guarantee that the 10% that is produced and consumed never enters the environment. And for me, I'm super interested in e-waste and tackling that problem. And in that area a lot is discussed about right to repair reducing the production part of the problem. But we create so many electronics I question the actual dent in production we make if still make 10s of millions of tons of waste.
Not that I'm overly concerned or anything, but in my experience talking about genuine recycling can be seen as giving a pass for companies and their issues like you mentioned and deflecting from reducing production, when that isn't the intention at all.
Kind of a weird comment maybe, but from the conversations I have had with others their headspace seems to be more focused on what they can do to reduce production and consumption while my headspace is more what can I do to make it possible so that my neighbor or whoever can dispose of any type of waste and I know it will end up back in some new product or truly disposed of. Just a difference I noticed, but both are required.
From pesticides to agent Orange their market plan always was single use, then throw away. The throw away never concerned as to where. Landfills are filling up, oceanic gyres concentrate floating plastic stuff but provide little room for living things. The plastics physically breakdown into particles that can plug up living processes choke and strangle but, the greed that drives all this cannot care one wit.
Agreed …. that we need to stop the throwaway consumer lifestyle. and not just on plastics.
Here are some key points for the future...
I don’t think we should be blaming the related industries (Oil and plastics producers) as they are reacting to what government are asking them to do. …
Plastics are an essential material element in our future products and going backwards without such materials will be impossible.
What we need to do is apply “sustainability thinking” to our whole economy.
We do need to make mine and grow much more of what we consume in a short and localized supply chain economy so we can have more of a circular economy, so that we can recycle, reuse, re-purpose, reclaim and mainly avoid throwing away any materials we dig out of the ground or grow and process for our use.
Our land fill sites are a direct measure of the waste as it relates to the cost of potential pollution by allowing this to happen.
Not sure that plastic is a huge problem in the Oceans but its certainly something to work on as with land as well.
We have enough regulations, and we just need to ensure they are enforced. But eliminating our industries and jobs and then our prosperity with over-indulgence in unrealistic advocacy action is not the solution, and just wont work.
There are some technological alternatives to meet cost, quality and environmental balance, but they need to be planned correctly and it means working with the industrial players as partners in our economic future, not framing them as the enemy!
Another point…. Pollution is always a worthy cause but must not to be confused with the pointless mitigation of CO2 and the futile effort to attack climate change.
We need to accept the definitive need for the ongoing need for fossil fuels to support our modern prosperity, and they will be essential to support any adaption to a naturally warming planet.
Any notion that fossil fuels can be quickly displaced with other technologies is unrealistic, foolish and irresponsible.
Forget NetZero… its not going to happen in Canada.
Here is an article that is just about where most of our voters are now…
We will be changing governments and going back to normal and sound reason soon.
Joe Oliver: Liberals need to ditch Steven Guilbeault’s radical activism (msn.com)
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/money/topstories/joe-oliver-liberals-need-to-ditch-steven-guilbeault-s-radical-activism/ar-BB1j28QQ?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=dc7833b993a84c3cbf51a30d58bb3b9a&ei=67
This next is a very sobering presentation… We need more of this discussion to get to the truth.
David Siegel: Manufacturing Climate Consent | Tom Nelson Pod #147 (youtube.com)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWhWuv7MMDU
I didn't see anything at the linked website documenting that plastics pollution was "on par" with climate change. The mass of plastic stuff we dump in the ocean is 1/3000th the mass of co2 we put in the air. There's a lot of discussion of the fact that all of us now eat detectable amounts of plastic, but not a lot of evidence presented that that's a big deal (cancer deaths are going down over the past few decades, for example). I'm not arguing that plastic pollution isn't bad - but if you're going to say things like this, can you please provide a metric? I would assume "on par" means, likely to cause a similar amount of harm. So please say what you mean by that.
I always thought this was an interesting read on plastics and recycling, and how we need to be careful how the data is presented. Even though this is at a publication owned by APR, it does take someone thru some of the facts and figures that most do not deep dive into. Are they credible? I am not sure. But I also face local commentary that say everything in your recycling bin goes to a landfill, so why are we spending money on it?
Because the fact is, it doesn’t all go to a landfill. Otherwise, why would MRF’s be spending billions of dollars in the capital equipment to sort all this stuff? Just to fool the public for appearances? C’mon.
And for that reason, sometimes I am a bit skeptical on the fraud claims. Not because I don’t think we need to dramatically reduce plastic, but because every time I am in a store, I see it EVERYWHERE. I don’t think it is very pragmatic to eliminate it anytime soon. So while we are working on better, more sustainable alternatives, we’d better figure out how to best handle the waste.
https://resource-recycling.com/plastics/2022/11/02/editors-take-the-problem-with-the-greenpeace-data/