Plastic

Two posts in one day!!! I must have time on my hands! Not really, but I felt it was important to jump into this and so here I am again today. Most times I will be presenting a small step with the reasoning behind it, but I'm going to start out a little differently. This post is strictly informational. I'm going to start out by explaining some of the reasons why you want to reduce your use of plastic products. Then I will start doing posts about small steps to take to reduce your reliance on plastic products. I will admit that sometimes getting a lot of information like this can be a little deterring and that it may also cause one to feel overwhelmed. However, I believe it is of utmost important that we understand what reasons there are to doing this and this particular topic is rather large and daunting so the reason deserves it's own individual post. So here it goes.

Plastics are a large and difficult category to traverse when speaking of the environment. Our society is reliant on plastics for everything from the bags we bring our groceries home in to the refrigerator that we put those groceries in as well as tremendous commercial uses for plastic. However, we as consumers need to understand a few facts about plastics. First, plastic is made from petroleum. According to Smart Cycle 7% of our oil goes to making plastics, 50% of which is used in packaging. Americans throw away 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour and plastic makes up 15% of our municipal solid waste (MSW). The following information from Smart Cycle is a direct comparison of the energy used for recycling versus the energy and consumption for making new plastics:

Recycled PET Plastic vs. New Virgin Plastic

Energy
11 million BTUs per ton vs. 70 million BTUs per ton

Greenhouse Gas Generation
0.2 ton vs. 4 tons

Air Emissions
0.02 ton vs. 3 tons

Water Discharge
0.5 lbs per ton vs. 10 lbs per ton

Solid waste generation
100 lbs per ton vs. 200 lbs per ton

SolidWasteDistrict.com states that

in 2001, the United States generated more than 11 million tons of plastics in the MSW stream as containers and packaging, over 6 million tons as nondurable goods, and more than 8 million tons as durable goods.

If you add that up you see that means over 25 million tons of plastics went into the MSW in 2001. This is up 11-fold since 1960. The many sources I looked up estimated anywhere between 25-33% of recyclable plastics are actually recycled. There are many reasons for this from a lack of curbside service in some areas, to a lack of use of knowledge and or effort on the part of consumers.

Plastics do not biodegrade, instead they photo degrade, which means that sunlight breaks plastic into smaller portions of plastic. They therefore break down into smaller and smaller pieces that then contaminate our soil and water. For more information on the life cycle of plastics, check out Earth 911's webpage that deals with the subject (it's their focus this month).

Unfortunately, we've all seen plastic bags and bottles on the side of the road and on our beaches, so not all of our plastic waste ends up in the MSW system in an appropriate manner. So what has happened to all this plastic waste? Well, many will be surprised to learn that much of this debris (as well as other pieces of trash) has ended up in the pacific ocean, in an area that many many have dubbed "Garbage Island", “Asian Trash Trail”, “Trash Vortex” or “Eastern Garbage Patch”. According to Greenpeace International:

The very thing that makes plastic items useful to consumers, their durability and stability, also makes them a problem in marine environments. Around 100 million tonnes of plastic are produced each year of which about 10 percent ends up in the sea. About 20 percent of this is from ships and platforms, the rest from land.

This trash that ends up in the sea then gets caught up in the North Pacific sub-tropical gyre forming a plastic soup that is twice the size of Texas! There is a lot of information on this "Trash Vortex" that can be viewed in a multi-part video series on VBS TV's website. I highly suggest watching it, but be warned that it is quite sad to see the state of our ocean and what our consumer products have done to it.

While this particular piece of information can be quite overwhelming and make one feel that there is nothing that can be done, do please keep in mind that while there is nothing that we can currently do about what's already out there, we can stop or slow down what's added to it. That's what we are going to do over the next several posts, as well as, hopefully, the rest of our lives. So stay tuned for up coming tips on how to lower your impact by reducing your plastic use!