There was a book written with this plot awhile back. Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater. I think.
I haven’t read that one, but the Andromeda Strain explores similar ideas. I’m hoping for something more useful, but maybe plastic eating bacteria are only good for clunky potboilers.
Big Oil, who lied to us about global warming, oil spills, environmental impacts, human rights… now revealed to have lied about plastics recycling. Well, at least we can say they’re consistent.
While we all await the magical solution that The Invisible Hand will provide to this very very bad problem, it is possible to drastically curtail one’s participation in broken systems.
Most people find eliminating plastic from their lives to be inconvenient, time-consuming, and requiring of thought, patience, and a willingness to accept some bulky gracelessness while toting one’s own empty jars and bags, durable flatware and metal straws, etc.
But.
Never let the perfect be the enemy of good.
Buying things made of recycled plastic is useful, inasmuch as it could use up the existing plastic stock we face right now. Recycling the upcycled or recycled is harder at the end of service life.
Plastics in our current space-time node are to some degree unavoidable.
I mean, if you wear glasses or contact lenses, nearly all of those are plastic. Medical equipment and tools, pill bottles, syringes, CPAP, et al.? Plastic, mostly. Got a swimsuit or swim trunks? Plastic. Own a car? Plenty of plastic in it. If you wear a poly-spun-bonded facemask, which IIRC are reputed to filter better than cloth facemasks for both inhale and exhale breaths? Plastic.
There’s a lot of embodied energy in plastics. Right now, it is economically unpalatable to recycle them. There are a lot of hidden human and environmental costs in plastics that are externalized. A friend who works for a city trash collection service tells me most landfill operators she speaks with know full well that landfills will be mined in the future, extracting resources from them in a future time when glass, metal, plastics will be more valuable than they are now.
ETA: added links in first sentence
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This seems of a piece with everything else that made the '90s seem hopeful and resolvable with wide social agreement. We can help poor people without changing the system! We defeated racism you guys, and no one had to be called out! Hey, we can save the planet by consuming! The Clinton bubble truly was riding on the ignorance that the joys of capitalism and the necessity of social goods were completely compatible, if not synergistic. We’re currently in the dark hangover from that party. I mean, of course many, many people knew it was all bullshit, but a lot of folks are out there reeling from the realization that real change is painful, and the chasm is wide on whether and how to deal with it.
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When I read this article, I remembered the other articles and documentaries I’ve read and seen, and I wanted to just shut down.
This was supposed to be my year of zero waste. I know that’s impossible, but I started the year being more mindful about my consumption of resources, and trying to reduce generating waste. I have enough reusable totes for a full month’s groceries, and do as much of my shopping local and seasonally. But then came covid, and everything went back to single-use plastic coverings on everything, and online buying has its own packaging & energy problems, and, and, and. So that didn’t happen the way I had planned.
I probably have created more garbage so far this year than all of last year, and that’s with me paying attention and being deliberate. The average American is probably not thinking about all that extra plastic on their food items when even the farmer’s markets here are single-use-plastic-bagging each produce item, not to mention all the increase in Amazon buying, which generates who-knows-how-much energy use and waste product.
I agree in principle with @Avery_Thorn - we have the knowlege to save our planet, but it takes the people in charge to fix most of it. Our own acts seem ridiculously tiny in the face of the reality of plastic islands and burning chemicals.
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The problem is this is a systemetic problem and needs a systemetic solution. We can’t individual our way out of the problem. If I reduce my single use plastic use by half, in my lifetime that probably accounts for about half of the lunch rush of my local McDonald’s.
We can’t expect individuals to fix a problem that was created by industry; and by pretending that we can, we give industry the tools to continue to ignore the problem. Which is why BigOil has lied about plastic recycling; it pushed the problem to the consumers for not recycling enough, instead of them for pushing plastic into every aspect of our lives. And it allows them to continue pushing plastic into every aspect of our lives because it’s still our fault for not recycling enough.
Landfills are the mines of tomorrow; and we are stocking them today. As hard as it is to hear, the best solution may be to just make sure that the plastic that we use is landfilled in the proper place, and that we push for changes to the system. Or we just hope that the oil runs out before the planet does.
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The article if you want it:
1196.full.pdf (793.8 KB)
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Cool, thanks!
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Also meal worms, apparently;
https://news.stanford.edu/2019/12/19/mealworms-provide-plastic-solution/#:~:text=Mealworms%20are%20not%20only%20able,%2C%20protein-rich%20feed%20supplement.
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Serious question/thought experiment, to what degree are plastics (assuming those which are petroleum based) effectively subsidized by the energy industry side of petroleum extraction? (don’t know if anyone currently knows the answer or if it’s it’s feasibly knowable without raiding the accountants offices at Exxon and Chevron).
How much of the worlds plastics production is effectively economic by-catch from the (presumably much larger) power and transportation uses. Hypothetically if we successfully completely displaced the demand for oil (via solar, geo-thermal, wind, fission, fusion etc) for those purposes - could that make the cost of producing plastics prohibitive, (particularly for the problematic disposable, ultra-low cost applications like packaging)?
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Everything you point toward, was also true in 1970. Old farts were predicted to die off, a younger, more idealistic generation was slated to rise to power, and the nascient beginnings of a post-scarcity economy was taking hold. Some people called it, “The age of Aquarius” and they werent being sarcastic.
50 years later, none of that good stuff ever took hold in a solid way. It seems dangerous to me, to underestimate Power’s ability to maintain itself.
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I’m not going to claim to have the solution, but a solution would be to take the externalized cost of landfill/recycling/whatnot that everything has and start forcing it into the actual price of items. Including packaging.
People aren’t going to stop buying soda in plastic bottles as long as it is cheap and easy. If it starts including the cost of dealing with the post-use plastic it will no longer be nearly as cheap, and use might actually decline. More importantly since recycling aluminum is actually something we do the cost of aluminum would not be increased as much and it some plastic use will be replaced with aluminum use (or the cost of both goes up and you get actual money back for dumping it in the right recycling bucket, while you merely don’t get a fine for putting plastic in the right place? Geeze, this is hard, it is like nobody has been able to come up with a good idea here for the last 40 to 50 years!)
Also, I thought it might be interesting to think about what it would take to do a “good” job recycling the plastic. There is apparently an energy hungry process that can convert clean plastic post consumer waste basically back into crude oil. So if energy becomes cheaper this could become a viable process (the value here isn’t making crude because if energy becomes cheap enough that this is affordable the crude will be basically worthless as an energy source, we will have a much cheaper one already, the value is basically being able to totally recycle plastics into new high quality plastics as opposed to having it leach poisons into the ground).
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TV Nation was a real gem. That episode where he drove around the deep south in a tractor trailer painted in the USSR flag was amazing.
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Economists agree with you. Plastics are fundamentally a pollution issue, and pollution is the classic negative externality. The problem exists because the people creating the problem don’t feel the pain of the problem.
There are two solutions to pollution:
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Ban it. This is how most industrial pollution is handled, because it’s easy and pretty effective. Probably not a great solution for plastic containers, though. Not a good solution for CO2 either, since it is necessary.
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Tax it in the amount equivalent to the environmental cost of it. This is the approach being taken for mining in Canada, for example, where companies are responsible for returning the area to its previous state when they are done. It’s the root of Cap And Trade and carbon taxes to tackle climate change. Once companies are incentivized properly, watch how fast they find ways to set up reusable glass bottle programs or innovative new container systems. You know, like the whole world was before about 1950.
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Not too long ago I read an article saying that glass is generally thrown away, that recycling it isn’t ‘cost effective.’
I also saw an even more recent article re: the coming shortage of aluminum cans, and hardly any aluminum is recycled.
Yah, my understanding is (and I’m far from an expert on this, so grain of salt) that aluminum is the only thing that currently has a viable margin, and it’s very thin. Only certain types of aluminum, as well. Like, car cylinder heads are quality cast aluminum that remelts very nicely, but aluminum cans are awful. They’re not casting-grade aluminum, and have all manner of weird coatings inside and out that have to be burned off. There’s also so little material in them for the handling cost that they really aren’t worth it.
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Incinerators are never good, even with scrubbing and filtering systems. Detroit had what was once the world’s largest garbage incin, um, “trash-to-energy facility.” Very quickly asthma and other respiratory illnesses appeared in its area, and much further away than you’d ever expect.
They frequently ran the thing at times they weren’t supposed to.
The stench at times was overwhelming. Outdoor patios at bars and restaurants two miles away and more were afflicted with an intolerable garbage-y stinkiness, which made them lose much business. We’d see people park near those places, emerge from their cars, make faces, get back in and drive away. It turned out the company frequently allowed the garbage to accumulate to ridiculous levels, and it took innumerable news stories and serious threats from the city and state before that changed.
When we smelled it while it was running, the odor was identical to LA smog. (I spent two years almost an hour inland from El Lay.) We’d occasionally see particulate matter in the air while also hit with the stink at our home, at least three miles away. Mom and her husband drove over there one night so she could finally convince him it was indeed the source of both, and they saw more of it - and bigger pieces! - the closer they got, and the stink intensified.
Garbage and even toxics specifically barred from incineration were trucked in from the suburbs, other states, and even Canada, and burned there. It turned out Detroit’s garbage was being put in landfills.
It was finally shut down after decades of continuous complaints, lawsuits, and myriad state/federal environmental groups’ fines, but only when the company leasing it from the city could no longer make a profit. The mayor said it will eventually be torn down, and perhaps a park built there.
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The crazy thing is that even with recycling exposed as a shame, we are going to keep doing it reflexively. I’m going to fill one of our city’s fancy “single stream” recycling bins with my “recyclables”, and the city is going to pay extra to single stream them into a landfill. We are going to keep doing it even though it is stupid, helping no one, and giving people the illusion that they are creating less waste than they are.
I don’t know what is wrong with us. You can rip the mask off and everyone just tries to look away and not think about it, because it means admitting to being a massive dupe. So we are going to keep “recycling” rather than admitting to having been duped. Even better, we are going to pay extra for the most useless of all types of recycling, “single stream” recycling. People are going to admit that this shit goes right into a landfill… and then keep doing it. It’s crazy.
It’s like politics is just taking over the place for religion and ritual in society. We are going to keep “recycling” even after we know it is garbage (ha ha, pun) because it is going to feel literally blasphemous to suggest that we stop because it is stupid and wasteful to fake recycle stuff. People that we suggest because this is stupid are going to be treated like heretics and accused of being agents of the devil right.
If we want less waste of any kind, it might mean making some hard choice. It might not feel as good or as easy as a single stream “recycling” bin where you dump half of your literal garbage.
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At the least it should be burned for energy production via making syn gas first followed by carbon capture.vastly better than poisoning the environment and wildlife with microscopic plastic particles. Lying about recycling has created a huge burden.
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