I remember growing up in the 90's and happily learning in school and on TV that it was my civic duty to recycle.
One of the biggest catastrophes of environmental policy was to shift the burden of plastic waste away from corporations and onto the consumer.
Corporations can pump out as much single-use trash as they wish, and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the result not of their practices but of individuals' inevitable failure to be conscientious and manage the waste they produce. Classic tragedy of the commons.
It should have been a matter of Federal policy, not individual choice. Just like the (successful) ban of lead-based paint and CFC's.
the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the result not of their practices but of individuals' inevitable failure to be conscientious
If you live in the United States or Europe, if you throw plastic away in the trash, there is virtually zero chance that it ends up in the ocean. To get plastic into the ocean in the US you would have to throw it in a storm drain that drains to the ocean, throw it directly into the ocean, or throw it into a river. The garbage patch is almost all coming from other countries that dump trash into rivers or the ocean.
> I remember growing up in the 90's and happily learning in school and on TV that it was my civic duty to recycle.
You probably learned the three R's, reduce, reuse and recycle, in that order. On the whole we've mostly forgotten about the first two and with plastics they're the only 2 that really apply. Before they were banned by the holier than though types I would at least re-use plastic shopping bags as rubbish bags, that was way less environmentally destructive than pretending to recycle the plastic packaging they were filled with.
There's more to recycling than plastic though, glass and cans can be recycled indefinitely.
There's a huge difference between "plastic waste in a landfill" and "plastic waste in the ocean." It's not like landfills just leak some % into the ocean every year. Some countries just throw far, far more of their plastic waste into the ocean.
More specifically here's a chart on where ocean plastic comes from:
The Philippines alone is putting more than 100 times as much plastic into the ocean as the United states is. And this isn't per-capita, this is total.
When it comes to plastic getting into the ocean, recycling plastic does nothing. Recycling plastic is like a religious ritual that reminds us that we need to care about the environment. It isn't actually doing anything. What needs to happen is that the countries that handle their trash badly - the Philippines, India, China, Brazil, Bangladesh - need to stop dumping so much plastic trash into the ocean.
One has to wonder, where those countries get all that trash from. Would it perhaps be from first world countries like the US that don't deal with theirs responsibly and just export it there? Why yes, yes it would[1].
One of the problems with these types of pieces that focus on trying to encourage activism rather than reporting on newsworthy topics they generally don't know the relevant facts in the areas being discussed. 20 firms is a surprising amount of diversity given the current level of concentration in manufacturing, which is well know to have economies of scale. Well known, that is, except to the BBC. Imagine how much more diversity we'd have if the top 20 producers in auto, airplane, laptop, cellphone, or chip manufacturing only had 50% of the market. That would really add more competition.
To put numbers on on this, in 2012 (I know, it was the latest I could find) concentration ratios in manufacturing were that the top 20 companies averaged 65% of market share for each NAICS manufacturing category (I am averaging along NAICS classifications in sections 31-33, not market share).
So the idea that in manufacturing you have economies of scale and so concentration is something that used to be part of a general reporter's education, so they could understand how uninteresting it is that half of all plastic packaging is made by 20 companies. But it's strange how unaware even the BBC seems to be of these topics.
Next up, they will publish a stunning reveal that lower priced products tend to outsell more expensive products. After that, a ground breaking story that firms which produce more goods tend to have lower average costs per unit produced.
> until now the emphasis of efforts to curb plastic pollution has been on the individual choices that consumers can make. "But we need to go after the tap, to turn off the tap of fossil fuel plastics and we need to create plastics from recycled material."
It's hardly as if if single-use plastics is ExxonMobil's only source of income. I say it's high time that this firm starts paying for the externalities it has so readily ignored which the rest of the world is paying so dearly for.
Not the list I was expecting. That is people making the plastics in factories. But yes, petrochemical products come from firms producing petrochemicals...
Why is single-use plastic a bad thing? It always seemed to me that the disdain for it was more from an emotional thing than an actual harm caused by it, but admittedly I am mostly ignorant of the situation.
Like, that plastic garbage island in the Pacific: why is it bad?
The argument against microplastics seems pretty clear. Is there a corresponding one for bottles and such?
Unless us, as countries, start forcing those recycling costs(actually costs, not sell to a foreign country to burn or dump), then we arnt really starting.
Those costs needs to be baked into the purchase price, or nothing will change
Single-use plastics aren't going away, even the "wokest" corporations use them for packaging. The problem is that in most countries and most households, they end up in residual waste where they're burned rather than recycled. Not even in modern, environmentally-conscious, high tax countries like Austria the garbage processing has been modernized to the point where plastics are separated and recycled from collected residual waste. This is what needs to be done (would be a good issue to regulate with EU law, as opposed to many others).
only a few plastics can really be recycled. plastic recycling is hard and not worth the money as long as pumping out new stuff is way cheaper. Thus the need of taxing the production of single use stuff.
As the linked article admits, it only sequesters carbon if it is plant-based, although I would wager that the production of single use plant-based plastics still results in net positive carbon emissions. Nearly all plastic is not plant-based. Even then, plastic waste is not collected and stored in a responsible manner. It is dumped in whichever way is cheapest and easiest, usually finding its way into nature. The environmental impact of a thing is more than just its carbon footprint.
Your paraphrasing of the source you reference is slightly incomplete/misleading, as the claim pertains to non-biodegradeable bioplastics only.
Keep in mind that still significant portions of (fossil based) plastic waste are incinerated as well. And scale matters: in the country where I live roughly 30kg of plastic waste is per person per year. That's in the order of magnitude of a single tank of gas of a small vehicle. In other words: the sustainability problem with current-day plastics is not so much in it's carbon footprint, but more the damaging effect to various ecosystems and human health.
Storing plastic waste is better than burning it, carbondioxide-wise (not taking into account additives or whatelse can leak out of them). Not making plastics from fossil carbon sources at all is better. Making plastics from non-fossil sources even sequesters carbon but as far as I know, this amount is almost negligible at the moment.
It sequesters carbon that was already sequestered. Probably emits a non-trivial amount during the extraction, transportation and re-sequestering stages too.
False dichotomy. No one is using less gas because we are using single-use plastics. It’s not like gasoline anywhere in the developed world is so expensive (taxes aside, as they are not a matter of supply-and-demand) that if there were less contention from single-use plastics it would be cheaper and people would be buying/burning more.
[+] [-] danhak|4 years ago|reply
One of the biggest catastrophes of environmental policy was to shift the burden of plastic waste away from corporations and onto the consumer.
Corporations can pump out as much single-use trash as they wish, and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the result not of their practices but of individuals' inevitable failure to be conscientious and manage the waste they produce. Classic tragedy of the commons.
It should have been a matter of Federal policy, not individual choice. Just like the (successful) ban of lead-based paint and CFC's.
[+] [-] lacker|4 years ago|reply
If you live in the United States or Europe, if you throw plastic away in the trash, there is virtually zero chance that it ends up in the ocean. To get plastic into the ocean in the US you would have to throw it in a storm drain that drains to the ocean, throw it directly into the ocean, or throw it into a river. The garbage patch is almost all coming from other countries that dump trash into rivers or the ocean.
[+] [-] flukus|4 years ago|reply
You probably learned the three R's, reduce, reuse and recycle, in that order. On the whole we've mostly forgotten about the first two and with plastics they're the only 2 that really apply. Before they were banned by the holier than though types I would at least re-use plastic shopping bags as rubbish bags, that was way less environmentally destructive than pretending to recycle the plastic packaging they were filled with.
There's more to recycling than plastic though, glass and cans can be recycled indefinitely.
[+] [-] bbu|4 years ago|reply
according to Seaspiracy, almost 50% of the plastic in the garbage patch is from the fishing industry.
[+] [-] diplodocusaur|4 years ago|reply
it still should be
[+] [-] lacker|4 years ago|reply
https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics
There's a huge difference between "plastic waste in a landfill" and "plastic waste in the ocean." It's not like landfills just leak some % into the ocean every year. Some countries just throw far, far more of their plastic waste into the ocean.
More specifically here's a chart on where ocean plastic comes from:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/plastic-waste-emitted-to-...
The Philippines alone is putting more than 100 times as much plastic into the ocean as the United states is. And this isn't per-capita, this is total.
When it comes to plastic getting into the ocean, recycling plastic does nothing. Recycling plastic is like a religious ritual that reminds us that we need to care about the environment. It isn't actually doing anything. What needs to happen is that the countries that handle their trash badly - the Philippines, India, China, Brazil, Bangladesh - need to stop dumping so much plastic trash into the ocean.
[+] [-] mariusor|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://boingboing.net/2021/05/18/the-us-exports-its-plastic...
[+] [-] KingOfCoders|4 years ago|reply
(not to belittle the single-use plastic waste problem)
[+] [-] rsj_hn|4 years ago|reply
To put numbers on on this, in 2012 (I know, it was the latest I could find) concentration ratios in manufacturing were that the top 20 companies averaged 65% of market share for each NAICS manufacturing category (I am averaging along NAICS classifications in sections 31-33, not market share).
So the idea that in manufacturing you have economies of scale and so concentration is something that used to be part of a general reporter's education, so they could understand how uninteresting it is that half of all plastic packaging is made by 20 companies. But it's strange how unaware even the BBC seems to be of these topics.
Next up, they will publish a stunning reveal that lower priced products tend to outsell more expensive products. After that, a ground breaking story that firms which produce more goods tend to have lower average costs per unit produced.
[+] [-] benjaminjosephw|4 years ago|reply
It's hardly as if if single-use plastics is ExxonMobil's only source of income. I say it's high time that this firm starts paying for the externalities it has so readily ignored which the rest of the world is paying so dearly for.
[+] [-] novaRom|4 years ago|reply
ExxonMobil,
Dow,
Sinopec,
Indorama Ventures,
Saudi Aramco,
PetroChina,
LyondellBasell,
Reliance Industries,
Braskem,
Alpek SA de CV,
Borealis,
Lotte Chemical,
INEOS,
Total,
Jiangsu Hailun Petrochemical,
Far Eastern New Century,
Formosa Plastics Corporation,
China Energy Investment Group,
PTT and China Resources.
[+] [-] Ekaros|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KingOfCoders|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sneak|4 years ago|reply
Like, that plastic garbage island in the Pacific: why is it bad?
The argument against microplastics seems pretty clear. Is there a corresponding one for bottles and such?
[+] [-] layla5alive|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cultofmetatron|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enchiridion|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cultofmetatron|4 years ago|reply
the ones that don't break down into microplastics where they can act as endocrine disruptors.
[+] [-] eCa|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crygin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _pdp_|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marak830|4 years ago|reply
Those costs needs to be baked into the purchase price, or nothing will change
[+] [-] lazyjones|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bbu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qPM9l3XJrF|4 years ago|reply
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wait-plastic-can-...
[+] [-] Flashtoo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] technocratius|4 years ago|reply
Keep in mind that still significant portions of (fossil based) plastic waste are incinerated as well. And scale matters: in the country where I live roughly 30kg of plastic waste is per person per year. That's in the order of magnitude of a single tank of gas of a small vehicle. In other words: the sustainability problem with current-day plastics is not so much in it's carbon footprint, but more the damaging effect to various ecosystems and human health.
[+] [-] _Microft|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flukus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] layla5alive|4 years ago|reply
That's like trying to plug a fist-sized leak with a toothpick.
It's not nothing, but it's not a good excuse to waste more single-use plastic (as you're implying here saying "Single-use plastic waste is 'good'")
[+] [-] ComputerGuru|4 years ago|reply