The Truth About Recycling Plastics
https://socialistaction.org/2021/02/09/the-truth-about-recycling-plastics/
February 9, 2021
By Paul Goettlich
We’re told that a world without plastics is impossible to imagine. But
70 years ago, I lived with almost none of it. Modern humans lived
without it for almost 200-thousand years. Now it’s plainly an
existential threat to all life on Earth. And it’s literally everywhere.
It’s impossible to overstate how much plastic surrounds us.
Plastics production began, in earnest, about 1950 and grew quite
steadily over the last 70 years to the point that more than 9.1 billion
tons of plastic have been made. That’s more than enough to cover
Manhattan’s 22.7 square mile area under two miles of plastic waste – a
staggering 45 cubic miles of plastic. Until recently, plastics
manufacturers haven’t considered where it would all go after its use.
Much of it is used less than one minute before carelessly discarded.
Plastics aren’t durable, but they simultaneously fail to decompose
safely in a timely manner. They all migrate harmful toxins into whatever
they contact.
We’re led to think the ‘chasing arrows’ symbol on plastic indicates it’s
recyclable and that the number inside the triangles indicates the type
of plastic. Both are exaggerations, essentially deceptions. The chemical
makeup of all plastic types varies between manufacturers. There is no
standard, making the recycling numbers nonspecific for the purposes of
recycling. Dave Williamson, an ancient plastic recycler in Berkeley,
considers that inconsistency in plastic formulas one type of
contamination that hinders recycling because they cannot be mixed
without decreasing its value. Another type of contamination comes from
the substances that the plastic containers held. In other words, your
food gets into the plastic. Conversely, that plastic also gets into your
food.
The FDA, which regulates food contact plastics, states that all plastics
must meet their standards for migration of toxic chemicals. But FDA
regulations are not consistent with current scientific knowledge. They
fail to acknowledge that extremely low doses of plastic’s constituent
chemicals disturb and injure the endocrine systems of humans and all
animals. And the industry is trusted to test its own products, leaving
us with little defense and protecting the industry instead. The chemical
ingredients of plastics are proprietary information protected by law –
trade secrets. The FDA is prohibited from releasing them to the public
which makes public research of the toxicity extremely difficult.
Officially, 9% has been recycled, but less than 1% has been recycled
more than once. That means it isn’t actually recycled or recyclable. The
system of recycling was never meaningfully thought out. Instead it’s
merely a tool of waste management that was fraudulently concocted by the
industry to impose its responsibilities onto the public. Their burden of
waste is placed on the public in terms of tax dollars, land use,
environmental damage and depletion, as well as simple aesthetics and
healthcare costs. These are enormous burdens on all parts of society.
Even academic integrity is severely affected by corporate control
through its funding.
Incineration is presently at 12% and rising. The majority, 60% of all
plastics ever produced were landfilled or discarded in the natural
environment. Plastics recycling is a lie. Biodegradable plastics is an
oxymoron because the legal definitions barely consider the massive
volumes produced and their toxicity. Quite simply, they don’t
biodegrade. Green plastics and the circular economy of plastics are yet
more distractions to allow plastics to continue being produced.
Bioplastics can be just as toxic as petroleum-based plastics. They have
the added burden of being composed of GMO crops such as corn and soy
which are products of a vile commercial ag industry that thrives on
highly toxic synthetic chemical inputs such as Monsanto’s Roundup
herbicide. Bioplastics also fail to fully biodegrade. The key tools of
these massive corporations are lies, spin, lobbyists, payoffs, threats,
and more lies.
In the early 1960s, plastic trash floated by me as I sailed the Long
Island Sound. In 1974, Dr Edward J. Carpenter wrote about his
observations of pelagic plastic in the journal Science. He recently
told me that a plastics industry representative visited him at his
workplace, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and threatened him and
possibly his superiors to discontinue writing about it. In 2001, we
learned that there was 6-times more plastic floating plankton in the
North Pacific Gyre by weight. The response from regulators was a daft
silence.
Twenty years later and conditions are critically worse, both in terms of
quantities and how much is known about the harm of these environmental
toxicants to all life. Not only has there been no effective action taken
in reducing plastics waste and production, there’s considerably more
going into the oceans, up into the air and down into the earth. My own
opinion is that the production of most or all plastics and synthetic
polymers must be halted immediately. If it is made, there is no way to
control where it ends up. And the chances of chemically redesigning
these plastics to be nontoxic is close to zero. Reducing toxicity could
be compared to a Biden presidency to replace Trump’s.
By 2016, the US was desperately keeping up with plastic waste by
shipping almost 700,000 tons a year to China alone. Then in January
2018, China essentially banned all plastic waste from the US and the
rest of the world. In spite of this, municipalities still carry on the
hoax of recyclable plastics by collecting them at the curbside. The
official reasoning is that if people are told to stop recycling, they
won’t restart. But most of it goes to landfills and incinerators. Actual
recycling of plastics is corporate puffery that won’t even come close to
realty for decades, if at all. And even then, in order for it to be
convincing, many of the environmental and social side effects will be
need to be kept secret from the public.
In Indonesia, tofu makers in the East Java village Tropodo, fuel their
boilers with plastic waste. Until recently, the US was a major supplier
of that plastic waste. The global environmental network IPEN <ipen.org>
studied levels of dioxin in free range chicken eggs in Tropodo and found
similar levels to those at a former US Army airbase in Vietnam, where
the soil was contaminated by Agent Orange. Dioxin is known as one of
the most toxic chemicals and is mostly anthropogenic, or human created.
The production of PVC (polyvinyl chloride) plastic inevitably creates
dioxin as a byproduct. The industry claims it as unintentional. But it
is most intentional because they’ve known about the problem for decades
yet continue to produce it. The incineration of chlorine-containing
materials like PVC also creates more dioxin.
Plastics are produced from refined oil and natural gas products, making
strong corporate ties between plastics and petroleum. One of the
economic effects of COVID-19 was that we used far less oil products. We
drove and flew far less, making the value of Exxon Mobile got so low
that it was removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The price of
plastics has also reached record lows.
Taxpayers fund direct subsidies to the fossil fuel industry is about $20
billion per year. That means we fund climate change. The US is now
producing more energy than is consumed. Therefore, the industry is
searching for a place to put its excess oil and gas, which it firmly
insists on continuing. Plastics is that place.
Industry has its hopes on Kenya as a hub to spread US plastics
throughout Africa. The key to the project are US-Kenyan trade
negotiations which its president is in favor of. The snag for him is
that on 28 August 2017, Kenya banned plastic bags and stopped importing
plastic waste. Undoubtedly, lobbyists will find profitable employment
seeking to circumvent this restriction and all other like it.
The truth is that all or most plastic production must be halted because
if it is made, there is no containing it. The same with the fossil-fuel
driven energy system and the associated global warming that portends
ongoing and deepening climate catastrophe. The profit system invariably
operates to subordinate the health and well-being of the earth’s people
to the private interests of the corporate elite.
Socialist Action News
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