Earth Day 2019: Pitfalls of plastic

25 Scary Facts About Plastic Pollution That’ll Change Your Habits

https://list25.com/25-scary-facts-about-plastic-pollution-thatll-change-your-habits/

Earth Day 2019: Pitfalls of plastic

By Doug Fraser
Posted Apr 20, 2019

A legacy of trash pollutes our airways and waterways

Plastic is everywhere, even in the places you wouldn’t expect, or want it to be.

“If you eat sea salt, you are eating plastic,” said Kari Parcell, waste reduction coordinator for the Barnstable County Cooperative Extension Service.

Recent research shows that tiny particles of plastic have entered the food chain. More than 800 animal species had either ingested it or been entangled by it, according to a 2016 United Nations report.

As if that weren’t apocalyptic enough, a 2016 study also projected that by 2050, plastic in the ocean will outweigh the biomass of fish.

Although the science is still inconclusive on the health impact to humans, the proliferation of plastic is concerning to many who care about human and planetary health. Recycling, they say, is no longer the solution. We need to curtail production.

“Plastic is not a positive thing for human health,” said Madhavi Venkatesan, a professor of economics at Northeastern University and a Brewster resident. Venkatesan founded the nonprofit environmental advocacy group Sustainable Practices in 2016 to focus on the plastics problem. This year, her grass-roots efforts resulted in petition articles on town meeting warrants in nine Cape Cod towns seeking to ban municipal government from purchasing beverages in plastic bottles. A second article on seven town meeting warrants would ban the sale of beverages in plastic containers on town property.

It’s just a first step, low-hanging fruit on the way to townwide bans on selling beverages in plastic bottles.

“Human convenience is a price the environment cannot afford,” Venkatesan said.

Ironically, the 2017 decision by China that effectively closed the door on recyclables exposed flaws in the recycling industry as well as the pitfalls of our love affair with plastics.

“I’m glad they (the Chinese) blocked us and that this country, area, town is starting to wake up to the reality of the trash we generate,“said Laura Ludwig, director of the marine debris and plastics program at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown.

Rates of recycling

While state recycling rates have been high for newspaper and cardboard, rates for plastics lagged far behind. That was due, in part, to the fact that not all plastic is equal. Some plastics are good for recycling — think marine shrink wrap or plastic water bottles and milk jugs — but others, like polystyrene used in foam drinking cups and takeout containers, are not. Less than 1 percent of polystyrene in the U.S. is recycled and it accounts for 35 percent of what gets sent to landfills, according to the website Eartheasy. Even desirable plastic like water bottles shows low recycling rates, with only 25 percent recycled in the U.S.

What doesn’t get recycled goes into landfills or is incinerated — or it litters the landscape. Discarded plastic chokes the landscape and rivers of China, which at one point handled over 50 percent of the world’s recyclables, including over 70 percent of the world’s plastics. China is home to six of the 10 rivers that contribute 93 percent of the plastics that get into the ocean each year, according to a 2017 study in Environmental Science & Technology. China is also the world’s largest plastics manufacturer, with 29 percent of world production. North America is just behind Europe with 18 percent of the market.

After the Chinese banned or severely limited imports of most recyclables, the industry ground to a halt, including in Massachusetts, where companies that sort and bale recyclables for market suddenly had to find new clients. Some paid for storage until they found those new markets, or had to request waivers from a state ban to incinerate or bury some of their backlogged materials. Some companies closed down, leaving municipalities scrambling to find another vendor.

It showed how close to maximum capacity the recycling industry was operating, particularly with plastics. In part, it helped the U.S. recycling industry and state and town governments focus on better practices and on restricting production. All but two Cape towns now have a ban on disposable plastic bags, a state ban on single-use plastic bags is currently before the Legislature, and bans on polystyrene containers, straws and other plastics are gaining momentum.

“There is a tipping point where we get people to change their behavior, and I think we are at that precipice,” Parcell said.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of hurdles to overcome.

Plastic is forever, the saying goes, and the sheer volume of what we are putting into the sea is staggering and potentially planet-altering.

Plastics production has increased from 16.5 million tons in 1964 to 343 million tons by 2014. That was expected to double by 2034, according to a 2014 World Economic Forum and Ellen MacArthur Foundation report. Of the 9.1 billion tons of plastic that has been produced since 1950, a 2017 University of Georgia study estimated that 6.9 billion tons is already considered waste, but that only 9 percent of that amount worldwide had been recycled, 12 percent incinerated and 79 percent was either in landfills or in the natural environment, including the ocean.

A 2015 University of Georgia College of Engineering study led by Jenna Jambeck conservatively estimated that nearly 9 million tons of plastic entered the world’s oceans in 2010 from the 192 countries with shorelines. The study predicted the tonnage would nearly double to 19.2 million tons by 2025.

“We’re taking out tuna, and putting in plastic,” Woods Hole Oceanographic researcher Kara Lavender Law, a co-author of the paper, told a plastic waste panel at a 2015 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. While some plastic rains down on the ocean from the atmosphere, the U.N. estimates that 80 percent comes from the land — from storm drains, wastewater treatment plants and trash. Once in the ocean, plastic can persist for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years, traveling with currents, sometimes collecting in enormous gyres, or whirling confluences of major currents, that bear decidedly unbecoming names like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

But Vankatesan discounts those who say our marine plastics problem originates elsewhere.

“I have yet to see any foreign language on any cup,” said Vankatesan of her experience at beach cleanups.

Litter by the numbers

Data from the 2018 Coastsweep, an annual cleanup of the state’s beaches, showed that, while a decaying catamaran, brass knuckles and a lawn ornament were the most unusual items among the 7 tons of trash volunteers removed last year, plastics in various forms were the most common, with nearly 35,000 plastic cigarette filters topping the list, followed by miscellaneous plastic pieces, food wrappers, foam, plastic beverage bottles and caps.

An analysis by the Center for Coastal Studies of items retrieved during cleanups and recurring debris on six Cape beaches showed that fisheries debris also weighed in heavily on what was found.

Ludwig was on a fishing boat this week in Cape Cod Bay dragging the bottom for abandoned or lost fishing gear. It’s no surprise that with numerous Cape Cod fishing ports, and being in proximity to some of the country’s major fishing ports like New Bedford and Gloucester, the ocean bottom around is littered with the detritus of that industry.

Ghost gear, like lobster pots, ropes and trawl nets, can be deadly to marine life, entangling sea turtles, seals and whales. But they also contribute to the plastic problem.

“All of these fisheries, whether lobster pots, fixed gear, draggers, they are all virtually plastic,” said Ludwig. “You may not find a (plastic) gyre the size of Texas out here, but I can guarantee there is a massive amount of lost or abandoned fishing gear in our backyard.”

Plastic was manufactured to endure, and it does. On her marine debris salvage operation this week, Ludwig’s vessel retrieved a trap that still had identifying tags from 1999.

“It was in like-new condition,” she said, even after two decades submerged in one of the harshest environments on earth, the bottom of the North Atlantic.

Even a diaphanous grocery bag takes 20 years to degrade, and when sunlight, bacteria, and waves do break plastic down, it’s into smaller and smaller pieces until they eventually reach the size of microplastics, less than a quarter-inch across. Other minute plastic particles include microbeads used in personal care products such as facial scrubs and toothpaste (these have been banned in the U.S. since 2015) and microfibers like those from synthetic fleece clothing.

Big floating pieces like bottles and packaging are visible on the surface and can harm marine animals — such as the 400-pound loggerhead that washed up on Sandy Neck Beach in Barnstable in November 2015, whose stomach contained a 3-foot-square sheet of plastic, a sandwich bag and a candy wrapper. A 2015 study showed that over 50 percent of sea turtles had swallowed plastic.

But researchers say 95 percent of ocean plastic lies outside the more publicized gyres, below the waves, in smaller particles, hanging in a kind of translucent curtain, or settling to the bottom. Some of these tiny particles are small enough to enter the base of the food chain. Ludwig said the Center for Coastal Studies recently obtained a microscope powerful enough to determine the polymer used to manufacture the plastic particle embedded in animal and plant tissue. One researcher is using the microscope to scan the center’s massive zooplankton collection, dating back to the 1980s, that has been archived each year as part of its right whale study. Although the research hasn’t been completed, Ludwig said they are finding plastic in the plankton.

From plankton, it’s a relatively straight path up the food chain to us. A 2015 paper published in Scientific Reports sampled whole fish from a market in Indonesia and from a market and fishermen in Half Moon Bay, California. Plastic was found in the guts of 28 percent of individual fish and in 55 percent of all species. Although man-made fibers were found in 25 percent of individual fish in California and in 67 percent of all species, and in 33 percent of individual shellfish sampled, researchers couldn’t say if these were plastic microfibers or some other textile material. One 2013 study in the online journal Environmental Pollution was able to calculate the number of plastic fibers in a serving of mussels from a German aquaculture farm and in a serving of oysters from Brittany, France.

But science has not been conclusive about exactly what health risk this poses for humans. Along with those fibers and the microplastic particles come toxic substances: the additives used in plastics manufacturing, and toxins like PCBs and flame retardants present in seawater that are attracted to, and bond with, these materials. Some are endocrine disruptors that affect reproductive success, others are carcinogens. A 2018 study on microplastics in seafood, published in the journal Food, Health and the Environment, revealed that there is concern for possible impacts including inflammation, disruption of the stomach bacteria, and that they could collect in the lymph and circulatory systems and some organs, and affect the immune system and cellular health.

“Every day we seem to be discovering more and more how insidious plastic is,” said Janet Domenitz, executive director of MASSPIRG. “Recyling is not the answer ... we cannot recycle our way out of the trash problem we are in. We must put the focus back on reduce.”

Public responsibility

But that will likely take advocacy on the part of the public, such as the successful grass-roots campaign that led to Dunkin’ replacing all of its foam coffee cups with paper by 2020, or the West Tisbury town ban on plastic soda and water bottles led by elementary school students. The plastics industry has its foot on the gas and isn’t likely to relinquish its market voluntarily, say plastic-ban advocates.

Ludwig thinks there needs to be a fundamental shift in how we think of our solid waste. She would like to see a trash economy that values what we once threw away and finds another use for it, like mattresses and box springs that once dominated landfills but now are taken apart and reused to make new ones. The policy approach Extended Producer Responsibility puts the onus on manufacturers to find a use for their product once it has outlived its initial use.

“The social and economic responsibility of having an economy of waste has to be an understanding of the value of the crap people throw out because it really is valuable to someone,” she said.

“We have to reduce the use of plastics,” said Jack Clarke, longtime director of advocacy and government relations for the Massachusetts Audubon Society. Recent history shows that beverage and plastics manufacturers will not be partners in that effort. He cited the expensive and successful campaign the beverage companies waged against the 2014 referendum to expand the bottle bill to noncarbonated beverages.

“They put $10 million into fighting us. We raised a million, but we couldn’t go up against the beverage industry, who had no interest in recycling,” Clarke said.

The plastics industry is based on convenience, the easy and cheap manufacture of products and containers that can just as thoughtlessly be discarded, Venkatesan argued. But the true cost, she said, is environmental: the carbon footprint of a petroleum-based product — plastics manufacture consumes roughly the same amount of fuel as the aviation industry — and the legacy of the trash polluting our waterways and our air.

“We have to change our value system so that we don’t dominate the earth, but live with it,” she said.

https://www.capecodtimes.com/news/20190420/earth-day-2019-pitfalls-of-plastic?utm_content=GTDT_CCT&utm_term=042119