It's a Plastic World

 

by Craig Willms

"I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Plastics. There's a great future in plastics."

                                                                                                    ~ The Graduate

In the film The Graduate, the character Mr. McGuire, played by Walter Brooke, advises Dustin Hoffman's character, Benjamin Braddock to invest in plastics. The claim was that plastic would change everything. And... It did.

So here we are nearly sixty years later, and we have a problem with plastic. Do we? Really? The answer is yes, but not in the way you might think.

When the plastics industry (read: oil industry) started getting grief about the environmental problem plastic was causing they tried righteously to get in front of it by pushing for recycling. The industry co-opted the symbol we all now associate with recycling - the triangular shaped looping arrow symbol. The symbol was not trademarked so they were able to put in on all plastic products. They categorized their products by type and assigned a number to each type. Today consumers see the symbol with a number on it and assume it means it's recyclable. In truth only two of the seven or eight types of plastics consumers come into contact with are actually recyclable. So, we dutifully recycle, looking for the symbol regardless of the number on it and toss it in the recycle bin. We have done this for 30+ years now. It's so ingrained that when my daughter was a child, she asked me ruefully, "Daddy, do we save the world?" I immediately said, "yes, honey, we recycle".

So we happily go about life thinking we're doing our part to save the world, feeling oh so good about ourselves. It's all a lie. Very, very little of the plastic we so carefully collect and sort actually gets recycled. Most of it is either dumped in a landfill, burned or put on garbage barges to be shipped to a third world country where it piles up or gets dumped in the ocean. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch anyone? The industry and the government have known this for years, for decades, but no one says a thing.

The truth is recycling plastic has caused far worse environmental damage than just burying it in a landfill. Additionally, we get to pay for it.

If it's well known in the industry and the bureaucracy that recycling plastics is a fool's errand, then why are we still doing it? Bureaucracy, say no more. One civic administrator responded to this question honestly and unironically by saying "the consumer demands it". What? Did I hear that right? Indeed, the consumer is conditioned like a well-trained like a sea lion at the zoo. People would bark and clap their flippers if their cities suddenly dropped plastic recycling. Yes, even if it saved them money.

It's beyond me the sheer stupidity of that true statement. It was the government and the industry with the help of the media that trained the human animal to always recycle plastic. When are we going to face reality and stop this environmentally damaging practice? 

Plastic is a miracle product, it has enhanced our lives, made things safer and lighter, easier to transport and so much more. Like most things it's not a win/lose proposition, it comes with trade-offs. Plastic waste is one of those trade-offs. The ultimate solution would be to make consumer products out of bio-degradable plastics. I haven't a clue the science or economics of something like that, if it were simple, it probably would have been done by now. Until that's a reality we need to be smart about this issue. Currently the best solution is to bury it in a landfill. Burning it or shipping it to ill-equipped third world countries is illogical and environmentally damaging.

Countless hands are in the till on this one. There are reverse incentives to do the right thing. The almighty dollar front and center. In the name of the consumer, they keep up the charade of plastic recycling, while the Earth is trashed and polluted. One wonders how many other fairy tales we've be told. 

 You might be saying wait a minute, we're supposed to throw plastic in the trash? The landfills will be full! No, not even close. Landfills have a tiny footprint compared to other human activities. Liken all the land mass on Earth to a football field. By the year 3000 we will have a landfill that stretches all the way to the one-inch line. It's just not a real problem. The problem is in our heads; we've been brainwashed into recycling plastic. It's illogical and damaging to the environment - that's the fact.