Dangers of Plastic Pollution Energize Citizens and Scientists as Lawmakers Devise Controls
Mary Lhowe | October 31, 2022 | ecoRI News
That plastic spoon that I used to eat my takeout salad today will remain on Earth for as long as the planet exists.
Except for the 1% of “bioplastics” made from corn or other plants, 99% of plastics are made from fossil fuels and a mixture of 10,000 petrochemical additives, also made from oil and gas. They do not biodegrade.
Some plastics will be buried in landfills or burned down into ash and smoke. Some will be chopped up or melted down to create other plastic commodities. Some will blow off garbage trucks, get tossed onto beaches and roadsides, or get flushed into storm drains. There, they will break down, chemically and physically, into smaller and smaller pieces.
Those pieces — tiny beads called microplastics — enter soil, plants, animals, fish, waterways. Microplastics have been found in human blood, placentas, and breast milk.
Further, many environmentalists note the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries are gearing up to produce more and more plastics as people turn to alternatives to gasoline, such as electric cars and renewable energy.
Carroll Muffett, president and CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), said, “The fracking boom of the 2010s led to a big build-out of plastics infrastructure. Plastics and petrochemicals will be a major driver of oil demand growth into 2050. Exxon and others can tell investors that their business models remain profitable even as demand for oil (for cars and electricity) declines.”
From a convenience standpoint, the plastic hero is single-use plastics, made to be thrown out after one use. Advertising from the 1950s and ’60s trumpets a jubilant command to “toss it and open another one,” along with pictures of happy families flinging plastic foodware into the air.
But from an environmental standpoint, single-use plastics, from grocery bags to Styrofoam takeout containers to nip bottles, are the epitome of waste, from production through final disposal.
Judith Enck, a former official with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and now president of the Bennington, Vt.-based nonprofit Beyond Plastics, said, “Apparently, we have lost the ability to cut our own fruit” — a commentary on the mountains of single-use packaging in grocery stores.
The worst of the worst single-use plastics are lightweight plastic bags, like grocery bags, that can’t be processed at many municipal recycling facilities, including the materials recycling facility (MRF) at the Central Landfill in Johnston. When these bags slip into the recycling stream at the MRF, they tangle in rollers and disrupt the sorting and baling of paper, metal, glass, and other plastics.
According to Global Ocean Plastic Waste, a 2022 study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the world produced 8.3 billion metric tons (BMT) of plastics from 1950 through 2017. By 2015, 6.3 BMT of plastics had become waste. (A metric ton is 2,205 pounds.)
Two dozen national experts talked about the environmental dangers of plastic production and pollution at two recent conferences in New England: in August at Beyond Plastics in Vermont and in October at Roger Williams University in Bristol.
Trashed Waterways
The oceans are the Earth’s ultimate sink. All water is racing or ambling ocean-ward. Plastics have made their way into every waterbody in the world in forms from floating islands of debris to microplastics. Global Ocean Plastic Waste notes that 8 million metric tons (MMT) of plastic enter the oceans annually. Further, if current production and use continues, the amount of plastics entering the ocean every year could reach up to 53 MMT by 2030, or “roughly half of the total weight of fish caught in the ocean annually.”
An estimated 633 species of marine life are harmed by plastics, mainly through entanglement or ingestion.
“We are turning our oceans into a landfill,” Enck said.
