How Big Oil and Big Soda kept a global environmental calamity a secret for decades
is ingesting nearly 2,000 particles of plastic a week. These tiny pieces enter our unwitting bodies from tap water, food, and even the air, according to an alarming academic study sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund for Nature, dosing us with five grams of plastics, many cut with chemicals linked to cancers, hormone disruption, and developmental delays. Since the paper’s publication last year, Sen.
“Plastics are just a way of making things out of fossil fuels,” says Jim Puckett, executive director of the Basel Action Network. BAN is devoted to enforcement of the Basel Convention, an international treaty that blocks the developed world from dumping hazardous wastes on the developing world, and was recently expanded, effective next year, to include plastics. For Americans who religiously sort their recycling, it’s upsetting to hear about plastic being lumped in with toxic waste.
In the open water, plastics are consumed by fish, seabirds, and mammals — which are washing up dead in harrowing numbers. Last year, whales in Italy and the Philippines died just weeks apart, their stomachs packed with indigestible plastic bags. In December, a sperm whale washed ashore in Scotland with more than 200 pounds of plastic in its gut. The pollution visible on the ocean surface represents just one percent of what humans have dumped into the oceans.
We are all guinea pigs in this experiment, as plastics accumulate in the food web, appearing in seafood, table salt, and ironically even in bottled water. Many plastics are mixed with a toxic brew of colorants, flame retardants, and plasticizers. Joe Vaillancourt is the CEO of a company that refines waste plastic into fuel — a process that requires removing such contaminants from curbside recycling. “In one little 10-pound batch,” he says, “we found a thousand different chemicals.
The virtues of plastic are as real now as they were then. “Plastic allows us to do more with less,” insists Steve Russell, vice president of the Plastics Division at the American Chemistry Council, which represents petrochemical companies. “Whether it’s to make cars lighter so they use less energy or buildings more efficient. They allow us to deliver a safe and sanitary drinking water through plastic pipes that don’t corrode.
To help keep pollution out of sight, the top companies of Big Plastic have continued to fund KAB, which organizes volunteer labor to pick up trash on land, as well as the Ocean Conservancy, which sponsors volunteer international coastal cleanups. Since 2017, the top 10 categories of trash collected in the beach cleanups has been made of one material: plastic.
The top alternative to burying plastic in a landfill is not recycling. It’s fire. Over the past six decades, far more plastic has been incinerated than collected for reuse. This incinerator, outside of Oregon’s capital, Salem, is operated by Covanta, which runs similar waste-to-energy plants on the East Coast that burn trash for New York and Philadelphia.
Global plastics production and incineration currently creates the CO2 pollution of 189 coal plants. By 2050, that’s expected to more than triple, to the equivalent of 615 coal plants. At that rate, plastics would hog about 15 percent of the world’s remaining “carbon budget,” or what can be emitted without crossing the 2-degrees Celsius threshold in global temperature rise that scientists warn can trigger calamity.
Trucost warns that the business model of the plastics industry would be upended if new government regulations, or consumer backlash, forced it to “internalize” and pay for these costs — a development that would pose “a serious risk to the future profitability of the plastics industry.”is waking up to the plastics crisis.
With the president championing its interests in Washington — and even triggering the libs with Trump 2020 campaign-branded plastic straws — the plastics industry is working to undermine grassroots activism in cities and states across the country. The success of blue states, from Hawaii to New York, in banning plastic bags has been countered by the industry-led push. PLASTICS says it has parted ways with ALEC, but some 15 red states now have laws pre-empting local plastic bans, with Oklahoma, North Dakota, and Tennessee joining the pack in 2019.
There’s a marked split in the seriousness of the industry response between the back-end producers of plastics and the consumer brands closest to the backlash. On the producer side, the American Chemistry Council has taken on a global role in crisis management. It has adopted voluntary commitments that give its members decades to change habits.
The New Plastic Economy’s goals include eliminating some problem plastics, committing to a 2025 “ambition level” of 100 percent “reusable, recyclable, or compostable plastic packaging.” Sander Defruyt, the project’s leader, is quick to call bullshit on plastics-to-fuel initiatives — “that’s not recycling,” he says, “and it is not part of a circular economy” — and admits that project members have shown “an enormous lack of progress” on pioneering essential models for reuse.
Perez’s brief is expansive: She also serves as the company’s chief of communications, public affairs, and marketing assets. Coca-Cola’s sustainability initiatives likewise seem nested within a marketing context.
The process begins by crushing styrofoam and breaking it into pebbles that resemble quartz. This material is mixed with shredded pieces of unfoamed polystyrene — material used to make red Solo cups. The mix travels up a conveyor belt and gets dumped into a reactor that turns the plastic into a gas, unzipping the plastic polymer to produce a styrene oil that’s cooled and pumped into black barrels for shipment back to a styrofoam manufacturer.
Villaincourt admits that “the existing waste and recycling industries have never been set up” to supply companies like his, and that many companies can make more money landfilling waste plastic. “For this to really scale very large,” he says, will require disruption — including from the government. “Some companies are just gonna wait till it’s legislated,” he says. “Because of the profit motive, there’s no reason to change.
South Africa Latest News, South Africa Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Three billion years ago, the planet may have looked like Kevin Costner's 'Waterworld'Clues in ancient rock suggest the early Earth did not have continents like we have today, but was covered by an ocean.
Read more »
The Trade Desk Imitates ‘The Big Short’ In A New Campaign Explaining Ad-TechOne of the more prominent publicly-traded ad-tech companies, The Trade Desk, imitated ‘The Big Short’ in a new campaign explaining ad-tech
Read more »
Contested convention talk heats up after Biden's big South Carolina win"Look, you don&39;t change the rules in the middle of a game," the former VP said.
Read more »
Bloomberg’s big bet: Can money beat Biden's momentum?In his brief three-month campaign for president, Michael Bloomberg poured nearly...
Read more »
California Is The First Big Test Of Sanders’s Voter Turnout MachineBernie Sanders’s operation could make him unstoppable in California today—especially if it can help him capture the support of voters of color who tended to break for Clinton back in 2016. The question now is whether it’ll work.
Read more »
'The Voice': Blake Shelton lays a big kiss on Nick Jonas after blocking him'As you can see I thought you were amazing, but my friend Blake over here decided to cut me off,' Jonas said told country/rock singer Joei Fulco. 'This is unfair.'
Read more »