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The world is drowning in plastic.

Experts say we need to stop making so much.

But the plastics industry is peddling a “solution” that works like magic.

Don’t be fooled.

LAST YEAR, I became obsessed with a plastic cup.

It was a small container that held diced fruit, the type thrown into lunch boxes. And it was the first product I’d seen born of what’s being touted as a cure for a crisis.

Plastic doesn’t break down in nature. If you turned all of what’s been made into cling wrap, it would cover every inch of the globe. It’s piling up, leaching into our water and poisoning our bodies.

Scientists say the key to fixing this is to make less of it; the world churns out 430 million metric tons each year.

But businesses that rely on plastic production, like fossil fuel and chemical companies, have worked since the 1980s to spin the pollution as a failure of waste management — one that can be solved with recycling.

Industry leaders knew then what we know now: Traditional recycling would barely put a dent in the trash heap. It’s hard to transform flimsy candy wrappers into sandwich bags, or to make containers that once held motor oil clean enough for milk.

Now, the industry is heralding nothing short of a miracle: an “advanced”type of recycling known as pyrolysis — “pyro” means fire and “lysis” means separation. It uses heat to break plastic all the way down to its molecular building blocks.

While old-school, “mechanical” recycling yields plastic that’s degraded or contaminated, this type of “chemical” recycling promises plastic that behaves like it’s new, and could usher in what the industry casts as a green revolution…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Are plastics killing us?

May 5, 2024

Are plastics killing us?

Jumping into the future head first, blindfolded, handcuffed, and in darkness

Jumping into a dark hole, head first, blindfolded, handcuffed

Plastics have been a feature of our world since the time they started being produced on a large scale in the second half of the 20th century. They are another giant experiment that we are performing on ourselves. As usual, we are jumping into the future head first, without thinking of what we are doing. Image by Dall-E

If you are a scientist, you may like doing experiments on mice. Not so much if you are a mouse. And yet, we are going through a series of planet-wide experiments in which we are playing the role of mice. Right now, humankind is engaged in determining the value of the climate sensitivity factor, that is, how the temperature of the atmosphere reacts to the CO2 concentration. This attempt may kill us all, but on the other hand, that’s the normal destiny of laboratory mice.

But the climate is not the only experiment we are engaged in. Several others aim to test how humans react to chemicals not normally present in nature. One is plastics.

Plastic waste is normally seen as ugly and obnoxious but not really dangerous. It is supposed to be inert, and, indeed, it normally is. You may occasionally bite off a piece of plastic from a wrapper while eating a sandwich, but nothing bad will happen to you — not immediately, at least. But plastics are not as inert as they seem to be.

Plastics are carbon-based polymers made by assembling smaller molecules, “monomers,” to form chains; the result is a solid that’s normally stable. Chains can degrade, releasing the monomers, molecules that are not inert at all. In addition, plastics contain all sorts of additives. A few are inert fillers, but most are not.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Coca-Cola responsible for more than half of worldwide plastic pollution, study says

April 29, 2024

ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) – Coca-Cola is responsible for more than half of the plastic pollution across the globe, according to a new study.

Researchers found that the Atlanta-based company is the largest branded contributor of plastic waste. In general, food and beverage companies are the largest polluters in the world.

The company is trying to do better. It is planning to collect and recycle a bottle or can for every one that they sell by 2030.

Survey finds that 60 firms are responsible for half of world’s plastic pollution

April 29, 2024

Survey finds that 60 firms are responsible for half of world’s plastic pollution

Study confirms Altria, Philip Morris International, Danone, Nestlé, PepsiCo and Coca-Cola are worst offenders

Fewer than 60 multinationals are responsible for more than half of the world’s plastic pollution, with six responsible for a quarter of that, based on the findings of a piece of research published on Wednesday.

The researchers concluded that for every percentage increase in plastic produced, there was an equivalent increase in plastic pollution in the environment.

“Production really is pollution,” says one of the study’s authors, Lisa Erdle, director of science at the non-profit The 5 Gyres Institute.

An international team of volunteers collected and surveyed more than 1,870,000 items of plastic waste across 84 countries over five years: the bulk of the rubbish collected was single-use packaging for food, beverage, and tobacco products.

Less than half of that plastic litter had discernible branding that could be traced back to the company that produced the packaging; the rest could not be accounted for or taken responsibility for.

“This shows very, very, very well the need for transparency and traceability,” says a study author, Patricia Villarrubia-Gómez, a plastic pollution researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. “[We need] to know who is producing what, so they can take responsibility, right?”

The branded half of the plastic was the responsibility of just 56 fast-moving consumer goods multinational companies, and a quarter of that was from just six companies.

The two tobacco companies Altria and Philip Morris International combined made up 2% of the branded plastic litter found, both Danone and Nestlé each produced 3% of it, PepsiCo was responsible for 5% of the discarded packaging, and 11% of branded plastic waste could be traced to the Coca-Cola company.

“The industry likes to put the responsibility on the individual,” says the study’s author, Marcus Eriksen, a plastic pollution expert from The 5 Gyres Institute.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The world dumps 2,000 truckloads of plastic into the ocean each day. Here’s where a lot of it ends up

April 23, 2024

The world dumps 2,000 truckloads of plastic into the ocean each day. Here’s where a lot of it ends up

A local fisherman performs maintenance on his boat while surrounded by trash washed up on Loji Beach in West Java, Indonesia.

The western coast of Java in Indonesia is popular with surfers for its world-famous breaks. There’s a majestic underwater world to explore, too. But it’s impossible to surf or snorkel without running into plastic water bottles, single-use cups and food wrappers.

The garbage sometimes forms islands in the sea, and much of it washes ashore, accumulating as mountains on the beach.

The world produces around 400 million metric tons of plastic waste each year. Every day, 2,000 truckloads of it is dumped into the ocean, rivers and lakes.

Despite global efforts to give plastic products longer lives, only 9% of them are actually recycled. Most plastic waste goes into landfills or is shipped to places like Indonesia and other Southeast Asian nations, many of which are already drowning in their own plastic pollution.

Clearing beaches of litter in Indonesia is no small task. The country is the world’s second-biggest producer of plastic waste. As the world’s longest archipelago — stretching over the same distance as London to New York — Indonesia has a vast coastline and three times the amount of sea surface area than land, making fishing an industry that 12 million people rely on.

Without adequate state services to keep the beaches clear of litter, fishing communities are on the front lines of the clean-up.

Loji Beach, on the Indonesian island of Java, is one of the most contaminated in the country.

Marsinah collects plastic on Loji Beach to try and sell it to informal recycling centers.

Plastic bottle labels are accumulated in a recycling center in Bangkok, Thailand.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

From the Recycling Bin to the Landfill: The Major Flaw in Plastic Recycling

April 4, 2024

From the Recycling Bin to the Landfill: The Major Flaw in Plastic Recycling

Reports estimate that less than 6 percent of plastic in the United States is recycled, pointing to the impracticality of recycling on a large scale.

People may be putting plastic into recycling bins, but most of it generally ends up in landfills or incinerated.

Yet the demand for more plastic production continues—at a growing cost to human and environmental health—because of the belief that recycling offsets the associated waste and risks. A new report by the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI) alleges that the plastics industry knowingly caused the current plastic waste crisis.

The nonprofit’s report claims that as the plastics industry faced mounting concerns over plastics being incinerated and piling up in landfills, they promoted recycling as a viable solution while dismissing it internally as impractical.

“They knew since the 1970s that plastic recycling was not going to be scalable and effective in tackling the plastic waste crisis,” Melissa Valliant, communications director of Beyond Plastics, a nonprofit aiming to reduce single-use plastic use and production, explained to The Epoch Times.

The report asserts that the efforts to sell the false promise of plastic recycling were to avoid restrictive regulations and potential product bans.Plastic Recycling Poses Many Challenges

According to the report, one problem with plastic recycling is that it is not technically or economically feasible at scale. Unlike glass and metal, plastic cannot be repeatedly recycled without quickly degrading in quality. Most recyclable plastics can typically only be recycled once. As a result, most recycled plastic eventually ends up in landfills, even if it goes through an additional use cycle as another product.

Between the 1970s and 2015, 91 percent of plastic was either landfilled, burned, or leaked into the environment, according to a global analysis published in Science Advances. Another recent report published by Beyond Plastics estimated that less than 6 percent of plastic in the United States is successfully recycled.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Amazon Packages Burn in India, Final Stop in Broken Recycling System

December 31, 2022

Amazon Packages Burn in India, Final Stop in Broken Recycling System

Plastic wrappers and parcels that start off in Americans’ recycling bins end up at illegal dumpsites and industrial furnaces — and inside the lungs of people in Muzaffarnagar.

Muzaffarnagar, a city about 80 miles north of New Delhi, is famous in India for two things: colonial-era freedom fighters who helped drive out the British and the production of jaggery, a cane sugar product boiled into goo at some 1,500 small sugar mills in the area. Less likely to feature in tourism guides is Muzaffarnagar’s new status as the final destination for tons of supposedly recycled American plastic.

On a November afternoon, mosquitoes swarmed above plastic trash piled 6 feet high off one of the city’s main roads. A few children picked through the mounds, looking for discarded toys while unmasked waste pickers sifted for metal cans or intact plastic bottles that could be sold. Although much of it was sodden or shredded, labels hinted at how far these items had traveled: Kirkland-brand almonds from Costco, Nestlé’s Purina-brand dog food containers, the wrapping for Trader Joe’s mangoes.

Most ubiquitous of all were Amazon.com shipping envelopes thrown out by US and Canadian consumers some 7,000 miles away. An up-close look at the piles also turned up countless examples of the three arrows that form the recycling logo, while some plastic packages had messages such as “Recycle Me” written across them.

A worker sorts through a pile of plastic discarded from a paper mill, identifying metal and other items to recycle at a plastic scrap contractors yard, in Muzaffarnagar District, Uttar Pradesh, India, on Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022.

A child holds a discarded toy at a plastic scrap contractors yard, in Muzaffarnagar District, Uttar Pradesh, India, on Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022. Photographer: Prashanth Vishwanathan/Bloomberg

Workers leave after a days work at a plastic scrap contractors yard, in Muzaffarnagar District, Uttar Pradesh, India, on Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022. Photographer: Prashanth Vishwanathan/Bloomberg

Waste pickers in Muzaffarnagar sift through mounds of plastic trash for metal cans or or intact plastic bottles that could be sold, while children look for discarded toys. Photographer: Prashanth Vishwanathan/Bloomberg

Plastic that enters the recycling system in North America isn’t supposed to end up in India, which has since 2019 banned almost all imports of plastic waste. So how did Muzaffarnagar become a dumping ground for foreign plastic?

…click on the above link to read the rest…

What a milk carton can tell us

July 31, 2020

What a milk carton can tell us

On the package of organic milk from Coop (Sweden) I can read the plastic cap is made out of oil. For some reason they can’t use biodegradeable plastic made from renewable sources. Instead they “support the production of the same quantity of renewable plastic somewhere else”. In addition they claim that they through this can reduce the use of fossil raw materials. This is supposed to make me feel good.

In this way, the package of milk illuminates two common phenomena in how modern businesses handle, or not, environmental challenges. The first is the notion of “compensation”, i.e. that we can compensate an ill by doing something good somewhere else. The prime example is of course climate compensation or carbon offset, which it often is called. But there are other examples such as habitat banking whereby you pay someone to provide ecosystems or species which you have destroyed. And now plastic compensation. There are many things to say about the notion that you can compensate for destruction. It leads to financialization and privatization of nature (read this excellent article by Sian Sullivan) and it often means that poor peoples’ environment will be used to compensate rich peoples lifestyle (e.g.. when you compensate your flight with tree planting in developing countries).

Instead, let me instead probe the other message of the milk package: That you can “save” or “reduce use” of fossil fuels using renewable plastics. In the case of my organic milk this is greenwashing in its purest shape. Before Coop introduced the plastic cap, the package had no cap, but the carton could easily be opened and closed. By introducing a cap of made out of oil Coop clearly increases the use of fossil fuels. But they look at the situation differently.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Plastic Apocalypse: Dangerous Microplastics Invade Alps To Artic, Found In Fresh Snow

August 17, 2019

Plastic Apocalypse: Dangerous Microplastics Invade Alps To Artic, Found In Fresh Snow

A new study has revealed that high levels of microplastics have been detected in some of the most remote regions of the world.

The discovery, published in the journal Science Advances, is the first international study on microplastics in snow, conducted by the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany.

Melanie Bergmann, the lead scientist, and her team of researchers found microplastics from the Alps to the Arctic contained high levels of the plastic fragment, raises questions about the environmental and health implications of potential exposure to airborne plastics.

Watch: Farmers create natural straw intend to break plastic’s back

“I was really astonished concerning the high concentrations,” said co-author Gunnar Gerdts, a marine microbiologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute.

Bergmann explains that microplastics come from industrial economies where rubber and paints are used. The tiny fragments end up in the sea, where they’re broken down by waves and ultraviolet radiation, before absorbing into the atmosphere. From there, the plastic particles are captured from the air during cloud development, can drift across the Earth via jet streams. At some point, the particles act as a nucleus around supercooled droplets can condense, and travel to Earth as snow.

“Although there is a huge surge of research into the environmental impact of plastics, there is still so much that we do not know,” said Bergmann.

Bergmann noted how the scientific community was only in its infancy of examining the process of how microplastics get sucked up into the atmosphere then scattered around the world in some form of precipitation. She said, there’s an “urgent need for research on human and animal health effects focusing on airborne microplastics.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Plastics Industry on Track to Burn Through 14% of World’s Remaining Carbon Budget: New Report

May 16, 2019

Plastics Industry on Track to Burn Through 14% of World’s Remaining Carbon Budget: New Report

The plastics industry plays a major — and growing — role in climate change, according to a report published today by the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL).

By 2050, making and disposing of plastics could be responsible for a cumulative 56 gigatons of carbon, the report found, up to 14 percent of the world’s remaining carbon budget.

In 2019, the plastics industry is on track to release as much greenhouse gas pollution as 189 new coal-fired power plants running year-round, the report found — and the industry plans to expand so rapidly that by 2030, it will create 1.34 gigatons of climate-changing emissions a year, equal to 295 coal plants.

It’s an expansion that, in the United States, is largely driven by the shale gas rush unleashed by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

The petrochemical expansion also comes over the same period of time that international plans to reduce climate change call for rapid reductions in greenhouse gases from all sources — transportation, electricity, and industry.

“Humanity has less than twelve years to cut global greenhouse emissions in half and just three decades to eliminate them almost entirely,” said Carroll Muffett, president of CIEL, citing UN figures. “It has long been clear that plastic threatens the global environment and puts human health at risk. This report demonstrates that plastic, like the rest of the fossil economy, is putting the climate at risk as well.”

“If growth trends continue,” the report concludes, “plastic will account for 20 percent of global oil consumption by 2050.”

The new report, co-authored by Environmental Integrity Project, FracTracker Alliance, Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA), 5 Gyres, and Break Free From Plastic, looks at how plastic production carries major impacts for the climate as it goes from raw materials tapped by the fossil fuel industries all the way through its ultimate disposal or breakdown in the environment.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Field Guide to the Petrochemical and Plastics Industry

October 29, 2018

A Field Guide to the Petrochemical and Plastics Industry

The shale gas industry has been trying to build demand for fossil fuels from its fracked oil and gas wells by promoting the construction of a new petrochemical corridor in America’s Rust Belt and expanding the corridor on the Gulf Coast. To help demystify terms like “natural gas liquids” and “cracker plants,” DeSmog has begun building a guide to some of the equipment and terms used in the plastics and petrochemical industries.

This guide, which will expand over time, is intended to serve as an informal glossary of sorts and an introduction to what happens to fossil fuels that are transformed into chemicals, plastics, vinyl, Styrofoam and a variety of other materials.

Petrochemical Production and the Climate

This field guide is part of Fracking for Plastics, a DeSmog investigation into the proposed petrochemical build-out in the Rust Belt and the major players involved, along with the environmental, health, and socio-economic implications.

These fossil fuels have a significant global warming impact of their own. The methane leaks associated with the natural gas drilling and distribution industry are so pronounced that many experts say burning natural gas for electricity is worse for the climate than burning coal.

While hydrocarbons that are used as raw materials for petrochemical products aren’t burned (and therefore don’t release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere), that leaky infrastructure still results in methane pollution. Methane itself is a powerful greenhouse gas, capable of warming the climate about 86 times faster than an equal amount of carbon dioxide during the first decade after it’s released to the atmosphere.

Making petrochemicals also requires a huge amount of energy — some of the largest petrochemical plants like crackers may have their own power plants on site — and that energy comes from burning fossil fuels.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

IEA: Plastics Will Replace Fuels As Key Oil Demand Driver

October 6, 2018

IEA: Plastics Will Replace Fuels As Key Oil Demand Driver

Plastics will displace fuels as the main driver for crude oil demand, the International Energy Agency said today, adding that petrochemicals will come to account for more than 33 percent of oil demand growth globally in the period to 2030. By 2050, they will drive half of the global oil demand growth, raising this demand by 7 million bpd by that year.

The report that contains the projection is titled The Future of Petrochemicals, and the IEA said it was part of a series of reports that aim to uncover “blind spots”, or facets of the global energy industry that receive less attention than they deserve.

Petrochemicals are indeed Big Oil’s big hope for the future—but the more distant future. Petrochemicals are used in thousands of products, with the biggest group among these being single-use plastic products. The bad news for oil is that green initiatives around the world are mounting, and many of them are targeting precisely this group of products. And yet, even if single-use plastic products are removed from the supply chain, enough demand will remain to drive the consumption of crude oil.

“Petrochemicals are one of the key blind spots in the global energy debate, especially given the influence they will exert on future energy trends,” IEA’s head, Fatih Birol, said. Petrochemicals are not just the plastics we see in single-use grocery bags. Petrochemical products are also essential in renewable energy installations such as solar panels and wind turbines, but also batteries, and thermal insulation, and thousands of other products and components.

The durability of petrochemicals demand is evident in the demand growth trends: the IEA says demand for plastics has almost doubled over the last 18 years, exceeding the demand growth rate of every other bulk material, including steel, aluminum, and cement. Perhaps more importantly, emerging markets have yet to catch up to developed ones in their plastics consumption. Now that’s a guarantee for steady demand in the future.

Plastic Pollution: The Age of Unsolvable Problems

September 17, 2018

Plastic Pollution: The Age of Unsolvable Problems

Suddenly, we discovered that plastic pollution is a problem, a big one. What to do about it? As usual, it is a question of governance: the problem in itself is not so terribly bad that it couldn’t be controlled. But, over the years, we develop such effective technologies of anti-governance that we have entered the age of unsolvable problem.

How bad is the situation with plastic pollution? Rather bad, by all means. Citing from a recent paper by Geyer et al., more than 8 billion tons of plastic have been produced since the 1950s. Of this plastic, 9% percent was recycled, 12% was incinerated, the rest is in part still in use, in part dispersed in the ecosystem. It is this mass of plastics, billions of tons, which form the pollution we see today. It is almost one ton of plastic waste for every human being living today. Imagine if it were magically to appear in your living room: one ton for every member of your family.

Still following Geyer et al., in 2015 the world produced 380 million tons of plastics from fossil hydrocarbons. To get some idea of how polluting this mass is, we can compare it to the total carbon emissions produced by hydrocarbon combustion, which today can be estimated to be around 9 billion tons of carbon per year. Plastic is mainly carbon, but we should take into account that the process of creating it cannot be 100% efficient. Anyway, we are interested here only in an order of magnitude comparison so we can say that about 4% of the fossil hydrocarbons we extract become plastics.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Everything That Dies Does Not Come Back

June 6, 2018

Everything That Dies Does Not Come Back

Charles Sprague Pearce The Arab jeweler c1882

There are a lot of industries in our world that wreak outsized amounts of havoc. Think the biggest global banks and oil companies. Think plastics. But there is one field that is much worse than all others: agro-chemicals. At some point, not that long ago, the largest chemical producers, who until then had kept themselves busy producing Agent Orange, nerve agents and chemicals used in concentration camp showers, got the idea to use their products in food production.

While they had started out with fertilizers etc., they figured making crops fully dependent on their chemicals would be much more lucrative. They bought themselves ever more seeds and started manipulating them. And convinced more and more farmers, or rather food agglomerates, that if there were ‘pests’ that threatened their yields, they should simply kill them, rather than use natural methods to control them.

And in monocultures that actually makes sense. It’s the monoculture itself that doesn’t. What works in nature is (bio)diversity. It’s the zenith of cynicism that the food we need to live is now produced by a culture of death. Because that is what Monsanto et al represent: Their solution to whatever problem farmers may face is to kill it with poison. But that will end up killing the entire ecosystem a farmer operates within, and depends on.

However, the Monsantos of the planet produce much more ‘research’ material than anybody else, and it all says that the demise of ecosystems into which their products are introduced, has nothing to do with these products. And by the time anyone can prove the opposite, it will be too late: the damage will have been done through cross-pollination. Monsanto can then sue anyone who has crops that show traces of its genetically altered proprietary seeds, even if the last thing a farmer wants is to include those traces.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Low Oil Prices Take Their Toll On Recycling Sector

January 18, 2016

Low Oil Prices Take Their Toll On Recycling Sector

That’s just as true today, despite many changes in societal priorities. Plastics are still ubiquitous, whether they’re made from oil or recycled from scrap. But a major change has come over the past 19 months, and there’s no telling how long it will be with us: The price of oil has fallen so low that it’s now less expensive to make plastic than to recycle it.

And this is hurting recycling, which is more than a social movement, it’s a $100 billion-a-year business in the United States. And it’s a complex one. One company sorts and cleans items such as used water bottles and food containers, then sells them to other companies that melt them down to make new items ranging from grocery bags to more water bottles.

Now with the price of oil below $40 per barrel – down dramatically from more than $110 per barrel in June 2014 – it’s gotten to the point where making new plastic from oil makes more sense because there’s no additional process of cleaning and sorting, according to Tom Outerbridge, the general manager of Sims Municipal Recycling in Brooklyn, N.Y.

In an interview with National Public Radio, Outerbridge said negotiating with other companies over the price of cleaned and sorted plastics had become brutal over the past year. “You’re negotiating around a penny or a half-penny a pound,” he said.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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