How can recyclers respond to the environmental movement's push to ban plastics

[Peter Anderson]

My wife showed me a posting on Madison’s neighborhood bulletin board saying plastics recycling is dead, citing this CBS story that has been running in many papers over the last month. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/plastic-recycling-rate-5-failure-say-environmentalists

 

 

Out of concern that elusive perfection can become the enemy of the achievable good, I wrote this reply, and hope it honestly captures our movement’s ambivalence. -- peter

 

Peter Anderson

If you believe it will be possible to ban plastics in America today, there's a hell of a lot to this article lambasting plastics' recycling.

 

And, with all the climate changiing natural gas used in the manufacture of resins on the front end, and the litter, ocean pollution, endocrine distruptors and toxics, and microplastics on the back end, a plastics’ ban would be a good thing for people’s health, for the environment and for lessening climate disruption. However, looking at our Congress with a jaundiced, gimlet eye, others will be exceedingly skeptical that plastics will be banned in our lifetime or the next or the one after that. I know Judy Enck, who is quoted in the article, and she is a great advocate for a better world. But, I must confess that, having been on the front line of environmental politics for 50 years, I just can’t see how a ban can be passed in the world that we inhabit.

 

For those who also suspect that plastics are here to stay for the foreseeable future, I would suggest that Judy is wrong in this sense.

 

First, if we can’t ban all plastics, and it’s going to be produced for many decades to come, it’s better to recycle it than landfilling the non-trivial part than can be significantly recovered.

 

Second, recycling plastics is not as bad as she recounts. When we think of plastics, we think of the soda, milk and detergent bottles we use, which is where most plastics’ recycling is concentrated. But, there’s a lot more resins used in other applications, primarily durables like piping, which is where most resin is deployed and which is the basis for her report. Just looking at plastics bottles, though, the recycling programs we see capture about one-quarter of that, and we know the secret to TRIPLING that recycling rate – and that is placing a 10 cent deposit on containers.

 

Third, there is roughly 17 times more energy expended to manufacture that plastic milk jug or soda bottle than remains in its walls. So, keeping those upstream benefits in mind, recycling’s environmental benefits are a big deal, even if it is primarily only done to a small segment of the industry.

 

Fourth, yes plastics recycling presently takes it on the chin when the price of oil is low. But, it only takes a couple of tweaks to make plastics recycling financially profitable over the oil price cycle. That chiefly involves manufacturers’ designing their bottles for recyclability by not, e.g., using multi-resin containers, and, e.g., supporting reusing the recovered resin back into high paying new bottles instead of downcycling it into low paying uses like carpets.

 

I respect the great work that Judy Enck and others are doing, but, because I just can’t see how they can achieve their admirable goal of banning plastics, I support plastic container recycling – so long as, with a nod to her, that I would never acquiesce to industry’s claim that that recycling justifies continuing to use plastics. If we could ban plastics, I’d be all in.

 

 

                                 ●

______________________________________

                Peter Anderson, Executive Director

  CENTER for a COMPETITIVE WASTE INDUSTRY

    5749 Bittersweet Place  ●  Madison, WI  53705

            Email: ande...@competitivewaste.org

       Off: (608) 231-1100 ● Cell: (608) 444-2817

                            Fax: (931) 233-6167

 

When I was born in 1947, the level of carbon dioxide

  in the atmosphere was 310 parts per million, barely

10% more than the 280 ppm in pre-industrial times.

     Today, CO2 levels are 415 ppm, 50% greater

          than when the Age of the Machine began.

      The last time CO2 levels were this high was

      2 million years ago, long before our species

    evolved and later left Africa, when the world's

seas were nearly 100 feet higher, and global surface

temperature was 11°F warmer, with beech trees at the

    South Pole, on a hot house planet incompatable

                       with human civilization.

 

[Neil Seldman]

Thanks Peter. What makes this dystopian story more incredible is that the environmentalists promoting EPR corporate control are saying: We trust the plastic/petrol industry!

Even as the record of depredations over the last few generations is clear. And, as the investments being readied for more virgin plastic production just in the US is now close to $1 billion---check out Exxon, Dow and friends.

The end game is clear--- abdicate local control with citizen input called elections; industry recycles in the same sloppy centralized manner (low value mixed materials transhipped left and right to distant mega MRFs) single stream manner, (American Plastic Recycling Association members are cut off from supply unless they kowtow as in BC Canada,  plastic is declared a haz waste that needs special handling, pyrolysis will be declared non-incineration. Low and behold we have not a circular economy, but  a linear economy with mass throughput. That is the US post WWII economy all over again. We know where that leads.

Hard facts, e.g. recycling stagnation and cost increases in BC, mean nothing. Ideology everything. They really are EPRistas looking to carve a legacy. The voices of the appliance manufacturing industry and home builders industry count for nothing. And of course grass roots organizations are drowned out by environmental giants.

Isn't environmentalism wonderful?

Perhaps we should whisper to them---tax plastic if you do not like it.The surge in the use of recycled plastic will be instant, as will the decline of virgin plastic:. A few pyrolysis and virgin plastic plants will be cancelled. There will be no waiting 4 years for the EPR/PRO program that, purposefully, no one  will understand.

Plastic tax + bans on any toxics in packaging + the burgeoning EPR-based refillable programs as in Europe = the plastic revolution we are all been working for. It goes by the name of Zero Waste these days.

Irony of ironies---the first successful EPR program was a bottle bill. Yet EPRistas don't seem to care that in BC the PROs are killing off the bottle bill. In the US the strategy is to privatize bottle bills which challenges the goal of inclusivity as our grass roots friends and canner in OR are reporting. Private bottle bills also mean hundreds of millions of dollars transferring from the public to Coke and Pepsi and Nestles in the form of unredeemed deposits.

Neil

Comments welcome, as always.

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Neil Seldman
Waste to Wealth Initiative
Institute for Local Self-Reliance

1200 18th Street, NW

Washington, DC 20036

202 898 1610 X 5210
nsel...@ilsr.org