Our plastic planet
Peter Dykstra for Environmental Health News
It's always a challenge to find good news on the climate and environment beat. And we all desperately need a little more of the upbeat stuff right now.
So
I apologize in advance for the following.
It's
hard to ignore the looming mountain of plastics problems. Plastic pollution has
been hiding in plain sight as the next eco-calamity for decades. With climate
change teed up as the major global environmental challenge, let's take stock of
another modern crisis.
Nurdle alert!
My first encounter with nurdles was on what should have been a pristine Costa Rican beach in 1986. The lentil-sized, grayish pellets spread the sands for miles, along with a stunning number of shoes. I never figured out the source of the shoe spill, but nurdles eventually became a headline-maker in the oceans world.
Nurdles
are the feedstock for much of the world's production of plastics products. If
plastic things were pancakes, nurdles would be the batter. They're spilled from
trucks, boxcars, and in the case of the Costa Rican beach, apparently a
container ship. There are no firm statistics on how many spills there have
been, or how many hundred of billions of virtually indestructible nurdles
litter our beaches and seafloors.
One
example: in 2017, 600 volunteers scoured 279 U.K. beaches,
reporting that two-thirds of them were "littered" with nurdles.
We
do know that nurdle pollution is the tip of the plastic pollution sh*tberg.
Let's talk recycling.
For years, much of what we think of as recycled plastic was collected in communities and eventually shipped to Asia. In 2018, the People's Republic of China formally announced that they'd officially had it. Imports of recyclable plastic had choked China's landfills beyond reason.
Early,
rudimentary successes with recycled goods had run their course. But we reached
Peak Flip-Flop, and China's National Sword initiative
slammed the door, barring plastic waste imports from the U.S. and about two
dozen industrialized nations.
Most
of our plastic goes to the landfill. In 1960 the U.S. sent roughly 390 tons of
plastic waste to landfills, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency. In 2017, the most recent year there is data for, that number
shot to 26,820 tons, which is about nine times more than was recycled. Yikes.
Part
of this is driven by the market to make plastics: the U.S. fracking boom caused
an abundance of cheap natural gas and oil. By mid-2019, it was cheaper to make
new plastic than it was to recycle the old stuff.
Here
are some other quick facts to put a damper on your day:
In
2018, Norwegian researchers reported
an enormous rise of plastic particles found in Arctic wildlife as well as
similar increases of plastic particles in melting Arctic sea ice.
A
2019 Scripps study of sediments in California's Santa Barbara Basin shows
deposits of plastic have doubled every 15 years since the
end of World War II.
Microplastics
are of increasing concern in farm soils, including those placed there intentionally as
seed coatings, artificial mulch, and more. Yes, intentionally.
In
June of this year, a Utah State University researcher reported finding at least
1,000 tons of microplastics in 11 remote locations in the American
West, including Grand Canyon National Park and Joshua Tree National
Monument. The researcher suggested that "plastic deposition" in such
remote places could mean we're bathing in it, even when we're miles from water.
We
know the problem has been building for years, and the paths to solutions are
often blocked by the fossil fuel industry, which
sees salvation in plastics production as its other marquee products fade.
While
we all rightly call for leaders to address, and in some cases just acknowledge,
the climate crisis, let's also remember to skip the straws and question those that
keep pumping plastic out into our planet.
Peter
Dykstra is our weekend editor and columnist. His views do not necessarily
represent those of Environmental Health News, The Daily Climate or publisher,
Environmental Health Sciences.