To Save the Albatross, Lose the Plastic
The figures are staggering: for the last few years, more than a hundred million metric tons – 220 billion pounds – of plastic is turned loose on Earth’s environment annually. The cumulative total over just the last decade stands at about 1 billion metric tons, or two trillion, two hundred billion pounds.
No meaningful amount of this has been recycled. Nor has any meaningful amount decayed into more natural products. There’s break-up, to be sure, but no break-down. The very thing that makes plastics desirable – their chemical stability – is the same feature that makes them so hard to get rid of.
Where has it all gone?
Some is in landfills, where it will remain for centuries to come. Some is incinerated. But untold millions of tons each year end up in the world’s oceans.
To many, the prospect of tons of plastic debris bobbing eternally on the ocean may be an aesthetic affront, but what’s the harm otherwise?
If anyone needed proof positive of the detrimental effects of plastics have on the natural environment, a trip to the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands would settle the matter. Tons of nylon nets, plastic floats, monofilament line, ropes, hawsers, traps, and all other manner of fishing gear are snared on the fringing coral reefs. The atolls themselves are carpeted with odd bits of plastic, from the smallest beads of resin, the basic industrial feedstock of plastic manufacturers, to the products themselves, and everything in between. These were not carried to the islands by ocean currents or tides; they were brought there by seabirds – primarily albatross – that plucked them from the far reaches of the Northern Pacific, mistaking them for food or gulping them down along with a batch of floating fish eggs or a tasty squid.
While it is easy to assign blame to fishing vessels from Asian fleets, which are an obvious source of some of the plastic, the problem extends far beyond any single group or nationality. Tracing the problem to its source, any reasonable person would have to end up back in the United States, which accounts for a high percentage of the world’s plastic production.
The only solution is the obvious one: the world must cut back on its consumption of plastics. That’s not to say that all plastics must be eliminated immediately. But at the very least, when natural products can be used instead of plastics, their use should be encouraged. A book that MIT Press has just published – Pandora’s Poison, by Joe Thornton – argues convincingly that the wholesale substitution of natural products for plastics would in the long run be much cheaper than dealing with the wide range of intractable issues generated by their production (these include toxic waste sites, increasing concentrations of dioxins and furans in the atmosphere, and the problems associated with the disposal of chlorine containing products).
What about recycling? For plastics, recycling on any large scale is simply not possible. Every different application for which a plastic is developed has a different chemical formulation. This precludes easy recycling. About the best that can be accomplished is what Thornton and others call “down-cycling” – production of things such as plastic lumber and playground equipment, for which the marked is easily saturated. And when it comes to incinerating plastics, this “solution” may well be worse than the problem it purports to address: when plastics are burned, they release into the atmosphere dioxins and furans that are among the most toxic chemicals known to man.
Maybe it’s too much to expect the world to go back to quill pens and India ink. But at the very least, before you buy one more disposable razor or gross of cheap plastic ballpoints, thing about the albatross. Your discard today may well be their dinner tomorrow.
Foodland is once more launching its “Give Aloha!” program. Shoppers at any Foodland or Sack N Save store in September can add a few dollars to their purchase that they designate as a gift for one of the participating non-profits. When the campaign is completed, Foodland will pass these gifts on the charities along with a percentage match of $200,00 provided by the corporation.
Environment Hawai’i is again a participating non-profit. Should you wish to supports through this worthy program, our registration code is No. 77036. Foodland will give you a receipt you can use for tax purposes. They do not let us know the identity of donors; should you wish your donation via the “Give Aloha!” program to be acknowledged in a future issue of the newsletter, please notify us directly.
Volume 11, Number 2 August 2000