One Word: Plastics

In the midst of all the climate crisis topics, I try not to let myself think about the problem of plastic too often. But recently several stories converged to the point where I have to put them here in my virtual filing cabinet:

A report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that:

The [plastics] industry releases about four times as many planet-warming chemicals as the airline industry....

Its emissions are equivalent to those of about 600 coal plants — about three times the number that exist across the U.S.

And if plastic production remains constant, by 2050 it could burn through nearly a fifth of the Earth’s remaining carbon budget....

And that's only about producing the plastics — not about what they leave behind. A story in the May/June issue of Discover magazine discussed inhaled microplastics. Recent research had already found people in the U.S are eating and drinking 40,000–50,000 microparticles per year on average. Additional work has found that breathing takes in about 100,000 per year, and that when sleeping, the particles probably lodge most deeply, since we breathe more deeply when asleep.

A sample issue of the British New Scientist magazine from the same time told me about another aspect of plastics I'd never heard of. The headline on that story is "Fertilisers add microplastics into agricultural soil." I couldn't figure out how that would be the case, but this is the nugget: inorganic fertilizers are coated with polymers to slow their nutrient release. Essentially, thin coats of plastic cover the pellets. They have been designed to release microplastics into the soil. It's on purpose.

It makes me wonder about all the other slow-release products that exist, including pharmaceuticals. Do they work the same way?

And of course, washing clothes that have any non-natural fibers puts microplastics into the water system. Can you even buy women's jeans without Lycra in them anymore? I'm not sure. The intentionally innocuously named fabric we all know as "fleece" is made from polyester (100% plastic). 

No one even knows the extent of damage that microplastics do to our bodies, or at what levels. But it's obvious there are many ways plastics are being used that are unnecessary, which the plastics and fossil fuel industries have devised over recent decades to sell more oil and methane as a hedge against declining demand for fossil fuels.

This commentary in the Washington Post (gift link) argues that recycling plastic is actively worse than landfilling it. From it I learned that up to 70% new plastic is needed in the mix to bind the "recycled" plastic into those picnic benches and other products, and also that each plastics recycling factory can send millions of pounds of microplastics into the environment in its wastewater. 

The solution is to require new laws and regulations, as the guest on this Science Friday episode says.  A plastics treaty negotiation was just held under the auspices of the UN in the past few weeks. I followed the talks in the Star Tribune, which ran AP coverage on page 2 pretty consistently. The final story makes it sound as though it was better than past convenings, and better than many expected. But it also sounds as though it was not enough: it's focused on plastic litter to the exclusion of plastic production, which is what the plastic-producing companies wanted. 

It's good that they made progress, and have agreed to continue talks. But this sentence sounds like the key outcome: "Environmental groups were frustrated that production cuts won't be part of the work between now and the fall meeting." But at least there is a fall meeting.

For yourself in the meantime, start by reducing your biggest use first. And props to the AP for covering the convening, and the Star Tribune for running the stories consistently.

I'm going to be looking into the organization Beyond Plastics.