Behind the climate crisis lurks the plastics crisis. Be ready.
Peter Dykstra for the Environmental Health News
Close-up of nurdles. Photo Credit: Jace Tunnell.
What
should have been a pristine beach was covered with small, translucent nuggets
that we first thought were eggs. Eggs from turtles? Fish?
It
turns out they weren't turtles, but nurdles – essentially baby plastic, a raw
material to be converted into all manner of polyethylene products. Decades
later, the world has barely begun to awaken to such plastics dumped, flushed,
and discarded worldwide.
Last month what may be plastic's Exxon Valdez occurred off Sri Lanka's east coast. According to reports from ABC Australia and others, the Singapore-flagged container ship MV Express Pearl caught fire. Its crew of 25 abandoned ship, and at least eight of its 1,500 containers pitched overboard.
One included literally millions of nurdles, many of which washed ashore. An estimate said there were 78 metric tons (86 U.S. tons) of nurdles on board, but it's not clear that every last nurdle spilled.
Sri
Lankan environmental officials told Australian ABC that some spots at the
Negombo beach resort were two feet deep in nurdles, and portions of the beach
that had been de-nurdled were covered again with the next incoming tide.
The
non-degradable, virtually indestructible nurdles thwart mostly subsistence Sri
Lankan fishermen and threaten ecologically vital mangrove swamps—and they will,
for all intents and purposes, forever.
From
scientific whimsy to ecological menace
Thirty or so years ago, marine garbage spills made occasional headlines—not as an ecological menace, but as episodes of scientific whimsy.
In
the late 1980's marine scientists from the then-Soviet Union reported
recovering Caribbean cruise ship trash that had hitched a ride on the Gulf
Stream to the Arctic island of Novaya Zemlya.
In
May of 1990, the South Korean ship Hansu Carrier lost 21
containers in heavy mid-Pacific seas. Five of those containers held 80,000 pairs of Nike running
shoes. Six months later, those shoes started beaching themselves
from British Columbia to Oregon – yielding some valuable info on North Pacific
eddies and currents.
Two
years later, 29,000 kids' bathtub toys – mostly rubber ducks – swam free from
yet another cargo ship while scientists made more scribbles. I couldn't help
thinking of these occasional ocean-plastic headlines as diversions, as
one-offs.
I could not have been more wrong.
Recycling
isn't going to fix it
Today,
plastic is known to be filling the guts of whales, seabirds, turtles, and more.
It's fouling our freshwater lakes and streams. It's indestructible, but can
reach our soils, our lungs, and our bloodstreams as microplastics.
And
the plastic is never going away. The world produced 348 million tons of plastic in
2019 – part of a steady increase since the 1.5 tons we made in
1950.
Half
of that 348 million is single-use: bags, packaging, and other throwaways.
We
convinced ourselves that plastics recycling would blunt the impact. How's that
going?
Historically,
we've recycled about 10 percent.
That's expected to go down, as the Asian and African nations that led in
receiving plastics for recycling are getting out of the business, starting with
China three years ago.
So, let's get this climate thing rassled to the ground so we can start in on plastics. Time's a-wastin'.
Peter
Dykstra is EHN's weekend editor and columnist and can be reached at pdykstra@ehn.org or @pdykstra.