Swimming Upstream

I hear talk that the tide is turning in the fight against plastic pollution. That laws are being passed, people are waking up, corporations are coming up with solutions. A sense of hope that scenes like this:

Ocean Park, Maine

or this:

Albatross belly, Midway Atoll, North Pacific
(site: soaronhirschi.blogspot.com/2010/11/
question-for-noaa-and-alldid-these-flip.html)

will soon be a thing of the past.

Reality check. Corporations are not poised to shun plastic. Quite the opposite. In our household, no product we've been using has turned away from plastic. In fact, we've noticed:

* Snapple, formerly bottled in glass, is now bottled in #1 PET.
* Honest Tea, formerly bottled in glass, is now bottled in #1 PET.
* Noxzema, formerly bottled in glass, is now bottled in #5 PP.
* Nivea aftershave, formerly glass, now unidentified plastic.
* Tom's of Maine toothpaste, once aluminum, now unid'ed plastic.

Among others.

The trend is global. In Europe, the plastic industry is nearing a tipping point: public acceptance of #1 plastic for beer/wine. Long a stronghold of glass, beer has begun to come in plastic in Eastern Europe. It's poised to enter the massive Western market. Elsewhere, Coke in Indonesia is ramping up its single-use #1 PET bottles in a nation that already can't handle the waste produced today.

More insidious is the trend to bioplastics. Turning food or compost into persistent, undecomposable polymers is folly. Yet self-described "green" blogs have fawned over the announcements, with only a few voices doing honest journalism and asking questions.

Couple this with high-profile failures in the Bottle-2-Bottle recycling world. In March, Coke quietly pulled the plug on its vaunted plant in Spartanburg, SC. This happened at precisely the same time that a rep from Coke was addressing the Marine Debris Conference, touting its commitment to recycling. Turns out that, surprising nobody, turning old plastic into new, food-quality plastic is extremely hard. Even "easy to recycle" #1 PET.

More and more of what we use is made of plastic. Whether that plastic is from oil, gas, compost, or sugarcane, it's still persistent, hard to refashion cleanly & cheaply, and deadly once in the environment. Millions of tons of new, virgin plastic are created each year. The old "recycled" stuff mostly becomes cheap feedstock for the stuff you see & buy at big box retailers.

Look at everything in your house that isn't yet made of plastic. Somewhere, there's an engineer in a company trying to change that. And some of every new thing made from plastic that was formerly made from paper, glass, wood, aluminum, steel, or anything else will end up in our persistently polluted oceans.

There are real successes in curbing the spread of this waste. Plastic bag bans and taxes are slowly making headway, despite the efforts of the American Chemistry Council with its dishonest "Bag the Ban" Web site and the equally misleading "Save the Plastic Bag" operation. A 9-year-old boy in Vermont is opening many eyes to the silliness of throwing away 500 million plastic straws a day. And speaking of tipping points, I'm an optimist that there will be a global tipping point against this rampant, unchecked pollution.

But for now, those of us who see the damage that our plastic world is causing have to be honest: The reach of plastics is growing, not shrinking. If we recognize and admit that, there's a better chance we can do something about it.

Deconstructing a Greenwash

Amid the tragedy unfolding in Japan this week, a press release from PepsiCo caused some buzz.

Full text at: http://www.pepsico.com/PressRelease/PepsiCo-
Develops-Worlds-First-100-Percent-Plant-Based-
Renewably-Sourced-PET-Bott03152011.html

Sounds wonderful. Plant-based packaging! Great, right? That's about as "green" as it gets?

No. Not even close. Let's deconstruct this.

Claim #1: This "enable[s] the company to manufacture a beverage container with a significantly reduced carbon footprint."

Reality: According to the plastics lobby itself, the natural gases used to make plastic are a byproduct of petroleum drilling/refining. By not capturing these gases as plastic, instead they'll either be flared off or burned as another fossil fuel. Sourcing plastic from plant matter does not appear to lower the amount of fossil fuels currently being drawn from the earth or reduce the carbon footprint of production.

Claim #2: "PepsiCo's 'green' bottle is 100 percent recyclable and far surpasses existing industry technologies."

Reality: The plastic made by this new process is #1 polyethylene terephthalate, the same exact #1 plastic that currently goes into these bottles. As explained in the "Triangle Is a Lie" trilogy, #1 plastic recycling is a downward spiral. Walk down your neighborhood grocery aisle. Look at all the #1 bottles of soda/water/juice. Find -one- that says "Made Using Recycled PET." Recycling a plastic bottle back into a food-worthy mirror of itself is extremely hard, because of contamination and the breakdown that happens to PET when it is crushed, remelted, and remolded. Recycling a "plant-based" PET bottle doesn't change this. For every single bottle of PET bought, 100% new virgin PET usually has to be created to replace it on the shelf. Plastic recycling is not a closed loop. It was never meant to be. It only offers a very cheap feedstock for recyclers (mostly in developing nations) who want to create lower-quality products from the free labor of citizens who recycle.

Claim #3: "By... using its own agricultural scraps as feedstock for new bottles, this advancement should deliver a... win for the environment."

Reality: PepsiCo wishes to take organic plant material and turn it into plastic. Switchgrass, pine bark, corn husks -- and eventually orange peels, potato peels, and oat hulls. All of these are compostable materials -- materials that can break down back into the building blocks needed to renourish depleted soils. But instead of maintaining a healthy and natural soil cycle, Pepsi wants to strip much of these building blocks away from nature and turn them into nondegradable plastic, which will persist in the environment for centuries or millennia. If it's ecologically unfriendly to use fossil fuels as plastic, it is folly to use nature's own perfect fertilizers as plastic.

Pepsi is correct about one thing, however. This is a momentous achievement. Because it now means that, even if some future society has been able to wean itself completely from fossil fuels, companies will still be able to keep churning out all the plastic our oceans can handle.

Business as usual.

The Recycling Myth

Today was going to be my collection report for December 29. Then something happened. Last night, I discovered this in the bag of junk I collected from Zone S:

(Added 1/6/11: The stamp on top reads "Made of 100%
recycled PETE")

And suddenly, everything I've been learning all these months came into focus. The #1 plastic (PET, or polyethylene terephthalate) I held in my hand managed to go successfully:

• from synthesis
• to plasticizing
• to pelletizing
• to shipping
• to factory
• to product
• to more shipping
• to retail warehouse
• to more shipping
• to retail shelf
• to 1st consumer.

Then a fairly rare thing happened. This lucky bit of plastic was among the 28% of #1 plastic that was recycled last year. (The number comes from the Natl Assoc for PET Container Resources 2009 report found here.) Remember, the plastic industry has pushed recycling as a panacea for 20 years. And even now only 28% is recycled.

From the hand of the conscientious consumer that recycled it, it successfully went:

• to recycling bin
• to recycling truck
• to recycling center
• to sorting/cleaning process
• to bundling/sale process

This now luckier bit of plastic was then among the 44% actually sold to U.S. reclaimers. Most "recycled" #1 plastic is dumped on developing nations, who use their own laws & methods of oversight. (From the same report, p. 3.) That makes 12% overall of #1 plastic that was both recycled and remained in the U.S.

Passing this next big hurdle, my bit of plastic went successfully from purchase:

• to shipping
• to factory

At the factory, only 76% of recycled #1 could be used, the rest was waste. Now we're down to 9% overall of #1 plastic recycyled, remaining in the U.S., and returned to usable flakes. These quite lucky usable flakes then went:

• to product

What product? Fibers, sheet, strapping, resins, etc. Oh yeah, and a little bit -- 29% -- went to making new #1 containers. (Same report, p. 8.) Now we're down to 2.6% of all #1 containers sold in the U.S. actually being made into new #1 containers. Now, my extremely lucky plastic traveled successfully:

• to more shipping
• to retail warehouse
• to more shipping
• to retail itself
• to second consumer.

At some point after this second consumer bought it, it escaped. It was lost at the beach, or blew out of a garbage can, or was tossed out a window, or got scavenged by an animal, or blew out of the recycling truck, or got swept out at the recycling center, or flew off the trash truck on the way to the incinerator. And it ended up in the ocean.

Even if this consumer had successfully recycled it, it would still have had to negotiate the path all the way back to product. What are the chances that a #1 plastic will get recycled twice into more #1 plastic? 2.6% of 2.6% = .068%.


Only 7 out of 10,000 #1 containers will get recycled -- really recycled -- more than once.

#1 plastic is held up by the plastics industry as a model. Its numbers are often cited to show the success rates of recycling.

Here is the truth: It's a downward spiral. There is no end to it, other than in the fires of an incinerator. We pat our backs when we take that old Coke bottle and put it in the recycling bin. But its fate is solely to move on, and down, until it winds up in the ocean, lays dormant for millennia under a capped landfill, or dies in a raging fire.

As it spirals downward, much of it will end up fouling the rivers, lakes, streams, ponds, shores, and oceans we hold dear. No matter our best intentions.

Just like the recycled piece I picked up on December 29. Do you think the person who recycled it the first time envisioned where it would end up?

The triangle is a lie.