In his Wall Street Journal column about concerns over plastic waste in the ocean James Freeman declaims:
Let’s hear from a few adults. Among the remaining questions: how much of U.S. plastic consumption ends up in the ocean? How much harm does it cause? Are there ways to keep plastic products onshore that are more effective and less costly than banning them? What will it cost to replace plastic? Also, Greenpace says the problem is due in part to the fact that the affected marine species can’t always tell the difference between garbage and food. In the absence of plastic, how much harm will they suffer from eating other objects?
Fantastic media stunts don’t necessarily prove that this is an exaggerated eco-scare, but proponents of plastic bans seem to have done almost everything they can to earn our skepticism.
Can we all agree that throwing large amounts of plastic in the ocean is less than desireable? Then we might be able to agree upon cost-effective ways of dealing with the problem.
As I noted in an earlier post, one of the lessons here is that sending our trash to other countries is no solution. It just puts it out of sight, a very bad habit of ours.
First, almost all the plastic in the oceans comes from Africa, Asia and Latin America. Virtually none of it comes from Europe or North America. No Third World and very few Second World countries have any environmental controls. Until a generation ago, no socialist country had any either, and that includes most of western Europe. Germany’s current hysteria is an overreaction to its previous indifference. It’s really a recurrence of German Romanticism, which in the past has usually been a precursor to military adventures.
Second, only a trivial amount of American trash is moved overseas, and what is moved has recycle value, as in the electronic components sent to China. There is, however, a substantial interstate trade within the US, generally from major cities like New York and Chicago that long ago exhausted their local landfill capacity.
Third, if you want to know something about trash, buy and READ Rathje and Murphy’s “Rubbish: The Archaeology of Garbage,” HarperCollins Pub., New York, 1992. Rathje is a professional, academic archaeologist. Sometime ago, he applied modern archaeological procedures to several American landfills. The results were a revelation, and falsified much of imaginary “data” published by the EPA, all of which was just guestimates based on nothing.
I taught environmental engineering for 37 years, 35 at a major research university to professional engineering students. One of the courses I taught was solid waste management. I have to say the every environmental story I have ever read in the MSM, about which I had first hand or professional knowledge, was false. The MSM coverage of environmental matters has been controlled by scientifically illiterate activists for decades. If you get your news from the New York Times or NBC or any other MSM outlet, you are not merely misinformed, you are brainwashed into delusion.
We’ve been shipping trash to China and India (where most of the plastic now in the oceans was deposited in the rivers) for decades. It has a way of piling up. How much of the plastic had an original point of use here?
But your point is well taken. More concern should be directed towards China and India.
Waste = something discarded, thrown away, without use.
Product = something that is to be reused or recycled.
Abstract government recycling goals have pushed more and more post-consumer materials into recycling stream with the assumption that if it enters the recycling stream it will be used as a product. Single stream recycling and curbside recycling expand the haul, but increase the need to sort-out the waste from the potential product and sort out the various recyclables from each other. Also, otherwise recyclable materials that have been contaminated (such as by contact with food) must be removed as waste.
This is where China came in. Communities could offload their sorting costs abroad by boxing the whole thing up and sending the problem away. While I would assume that most of the stuff is recyclable, I don’t know how much was in fact recycled out of Schrodinger’s recyling crate. But never mind, China has now announced a ban on all bust a list of recyclable post-consumer materials, which is giving the world a headache. I haven’t looked at it closely, but it looks like China only wants pre-sorted products, which probably defeats the whole purpose of sending anything to China.
I put rough definitions at the top to clarify that I don’t think its sufficient for someone to have an altruistic intent to constitute recycling. Consumers do not always have a good idea of what should or should not be placed in recycling. Along the way, materials to be recycled might be diverted to the landfill if capacity is overloaded and/or the cost of handling is too high relative to disposal. The materials capable of being recycled still may not have a market and if held too long, state regulators will identify such operations as speculative, sham-recycling operations and face fines and orders to landfill. If we could be more realistic and transparent about what is happening, we could save a lot of time and money and landfill stuff in the first place.
During our year of travel, it was amazing the variations in terms of what could and couldn’t be recycled across the country, or even in one state. The only two constants were aluminum and glass – everything else was highly variable depending on where we were.
I have no idea where it all goes.