What a week! A few
nights ago I found myself sitting in the middle of the floor with all my
articles printed out (sorry trees) and spread out around me so I could try to
make sense of all the ideas and statistics I now had at my fingertips. The opposing side had alluded me for a while,
until the light bulb moment arrived:
What benefits are there of recycling?
What benefits do plastics have?
Why am I trying to demonise something that has given us so much?
On “my side”, there was a study out just this year that had
been cited in several newspaper articles, “Plastic waste inputs from land into
the ocean”. What’s so special about this
article? The big problem I had was
finding quantitative data on New Zealand specifically. Here in one small paper (and one very large
supplementary table), Jenna Jambeck and her team had pulled together data from 105
countries, including New Zealand, to estimate the amount of plastic waste
entering the oceans.
The supplementary table gave details of total waste
generated, the percentage of plastic waste, and the percentage of mismanaged
waste from each of the 105 countries.
For New Zealand these results do not sound at all clean or green. The amount of actual plastic waste generated
is staggering; 1,272,006 kg per day. From this over 25,000 kg of plastic waste
is littered every day.
With all the data the team collated from around the world, they
estimated the total amount of plastic waste entering the oceans to be between
4.8 and 12.7 million metric tonnes and that this will increase as populations
grow. They recommend waste reduction and
improving waste management immediately for single-use plastics, which is a
stance hard to argue with when looking at these figures.
Perspective two: “Applications and societal benefits of
plastics”. There’s a reason plastics
have become so popular. This article by
Anthony Andrady and Mike Neal points out these benefits including reference to
attributes such as being lightweight, cheap, durable, strong, and
versatile. Due to these properties,
plastics have opened up a whole new world for packaging food and water safely. Single-use plastic for wrapping food is an hygienic
and healthy alternative to older food storage methods. And plastics have helped us to make great
improvements in technology, such as lighter cars and planes that are more fuel
efficient.
They also go on to describe the benefits of recycling
plastics. He considers recycling to be
an “energy-saving strategy” that makes sense from an environmental point of
view. A way of conserving the materials
that are used in their production.
So to love it or hate it, how do we find the middle road
where we get the benefits but not the environmental fall out? I still believe strongly that single use
plastics are used more than is absolutely necessary. That we should not be wasting energy
recycling something that we wasted energy in creating in the first
instance. And so the debate will go on.
REFERENCES:
Andrady, A. L., & Neal, M. A. (2009). Applications and societal
benefits of plastics. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B:
Biological Sciences, 364(1526),
1977-1984. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2008.0304
Jambeck, J. R., Geyer, R., Wilcox, C., Siegler, T. R., Perryman, M.,
Andrady, A., … Law, K.L. (2015). Plastic waste inputs from land into the ocean.
Science, 347(6223), 768-771. doi: 10.1126/science.1260352
Jambeck, J. R., Geyer, R., Wilcox, C., Siegler, T. R., Perryman, M.,
Andrady, A., … Law, K.L. (2015). Plastic waste inputs from land into the ocean:
Data S1 [Supplementary Table]. Science,
347(6223), 768-771. Retrieved from http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6223/768/suppl/DC1
4 comments:
Great blog after what was quite a hard assignment. Hope you gave yourself a big pat on the back.
Perhaps talking about recycling plastics being energy-consumption effective in NZ would make more sense if we actually recycled more than barely 1/4 of our plastic waste within NZ- the rest is shipped off to other countries, predominantly mainland China, for recycling (http://www.smartpackaging.org.nz/recycling-in-nz/where-does-it-all-go/). Taking into account those figures you state, that's a huge amount of energy resources gone down the drain to transport such an enormous amount of plastic overseas.
However, I'm not saying that we should just discard all our plastic to landfill because of this. I agree with you that we urgently need to reduce our dependence on single-use plastic in everyday life, despite its convenience, if we don't want to find ourselves practically buried in plastic in the near future. I've heard that biodegradable plastic alternatives are a promising, inexpensive substitute for single-use plastics found in packaging, but it seems that they're not without their drawbacks either; for example, the staggering amounts of methane tonnes of biodegradable plastics sitting in landfills could potentially release (http://dujs.dartmouth.edu/applied_sciences/biodegradable-plastic-its-promises-and-consequences#.VmSqmL8mLIU). In the end, it really seems that more effective waste management is the way to go. Finding that middle road is difficult indeed, especially in a situation where plastic consumption is increasing at a terrifying rate.
Its an interesting debate all right.
I would have found it helpful if you had told me the subject you had chosen at the beginning of the piece.
Thanks Christina, I had a lot more details that could have gone into the report to build the case, but alas i had to cull so much to fit into the word limit. I see even the new soft plastic recycling means shipping off to Australia to begin with, hardly a good use of resources. As for biodegradable, i switched to biodegradable rubbish bags my self awhile ago. An easy thing to do, not much effort, yet it helps the environment.
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