Just 20 firms behind more than half of single-use plastic waste – study
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
One of the biggest catastrophes of environmental policy was to shift the burden of plastic waste away from corporations and onto the consumer.
Corporations can pump out as much single-use trash as they wish, and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the result not of their practices but of individuals' inevitable failure to be conscientious and manage the waste they produce. Classic tragedy of the commons.
It should have been a matter of Federal policy, not individual choice. Just like the (successful) ban of lead-based paint and CFC's.
If you live in the United States or Europe, if you throw plastic away in the trash, there is virtually zero chance that it ends up in the ocean. To get plastic into the ocean in the US you would have to throw it in a storm drain that drains to the ocean, throw it directly into the ocean, or throw it into a river. The garbage patch is almost all coming from other countries that dump trash into rivers or the ocean.
according to Seaspiracy, almost 50% of the plastic in the garbage patch is from the fishing industry.
You probably learned the three R's, reduce, reuse and recycle, in that order. On the whole we've mostly forgotten about the first two and with plastics they're the only 2 that really apply. Before they were banned by the holier than though types I would at least re-use plastic shopping bags as rubbish bags, that was way less environmentally destructive than pretending to recycle the plastic packaging they were filled with.
There's more to recycling than plastic though, glass and cans can be recycled indefinitely.
it still should be
https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics
There's a huge difference between "plastic waste in a landfill" and "plastic waste in the ocean." It's not like landfills just leak some % into the ocean every year. Some countries just throw far, far more of their plastic waste into the ocean.
More specifically here's a chart on where ocean plastic comes from:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/plastic-waste-emitted-to-...
The Philippines alone is putting more than 100 times as much plastic into the ocean as the United states is. And this isn't per-capita, this is total.
When it comes to plastic getting into the ocean, recycling plastic does nothing. Recycling plastic is like a religious ritual that reminds us that we need to care about the environment. It isn't actually doing anything. What needs to happen is that the countries that handle their trash badly - the Philippines, India, China, Brazil, Bangladesh - need to stop dumping so much plastic trash into the ocean.
[1] https://boingboing.net/2021/05/18/the-us-exports-its-plastic...
(not to belittle the single-use plastic waste problem)
To put numbers on on this, in 2012 (I know, it was the latest I could find) concentration ratios in manufacturing were that the top 20 companies averaged 65% of market share for each NAICS manufacturing category (I am averaging along NAICS classifications in sections 31-33, not market share).
So the idea that in manufacturing you have economies of scale and so concentration is something that used to be part of a general reporter's education, so they could understand how uninteresting it is that half of all plastic packaging is made by 20 companies. But it's strange how unaware even the BBC seems to be of these topics.
Next up, they will publish a stunning reveal that lower priced products tend to outsell more expensive products. After that, a ground breaking story that firms which produce more goods tend to have lower average costs per unit produced.
It's hardly as if if single-use plastics is ExxonMobil's only source of income. I say it's high time that this firm starts paying for the externalities it has so readily ignored which the rest of the world is paying so dearly for.
ExxonMobil,
Dow,
Sinopec,
Indorama Ventures,
Saudi Aramco,
PetroChina,
LyondellBasell,
Reliance Industries,
Braskem,
Alpek SA de CV,
Borealis,
Lotte Chemical,
INEOS,
Total,
Jiangsu Hailun Petrochemical,
Far Eastern New Century,
Formosa Plastics Corporation,
China Energy Investment Group,
PTT and China Resources.
Like, that plastic garbage island in the Pacific: why is it bad?
The argument against microplastics seems pretty clear. Is there a corresponding one for bottles and such?
Sure, some landfills can leak, but that's a design flaw of landfills. Is it bad to responsibly dispose of single use plastic in a landfill where it may be reclaimed by future technology?
It's just not a realistic starting point to build an argument around. You have to assume people will improperly dispose of it as an axiom.
As you can imagine, this process means lots of trash never makes it to the landfill. Vietnam is one long coast with several major, densely populated river deltas. All that loose trash makes it’s way to the sea, to be broken down into micro-plastics by the sun and wave action. Those micro-plastics bioaggregate in some of our favorite fish and crustaceans. I suppose it is fitting that we consume it ourselves.
Recently, I travelled to Delhi where there is a ban in single use plastic. There was a lot less litter. This could be due to different a trash collection system, culture, etc. There was some paper litter, but I didn’t see the epidemic of plastic food containers I see in VN, Thailand, and Cambodia.
the ones that don't break down into microplastics where they can act as endocrine disruptors.
The breakdown of a gazillion tons of non-single use plastic that is exposed to the sun on a daily basis?
I'm not saying single use plastics are good, but if your argument is that they're bad because they make microplastics then you've got to expand the discussion I think.
Those costs needs to be baked into the purchase price, or nothing will change
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wait-plastic-can-...
Just search for "gas prices" on Google News and you'll see that people are very concerned about the price of gas. Much more than most commodities, actually.
That's like trying to plug a fist-sized leak with a toothpick.
It's not nothing, but it's not a good excuse to waste more single-use plastic (as you're implying here saying "Single-use plastic waste is 'good'")
So while this won't solve it on its own, neither will anything else. We need to start doing what we can and stop worrying about whether it will be enough in isolation.
Suppose I get upset about all the fossil fuel which is being burned and decide to do something about it. I buy up fossil fuel and instead of burning it, I sequester it underground in such a way that it can't be used by drilling companies. This seems clearly good for the environment, no?
"Wasting" plastic does exactly this. If you buy ordinary non-biodegradable plastic, and dispose of it in the garbage so it goes to the landfill, you are effectively buying up fossil fuel which could have been burned, paying someone to transform it into solid form so it can't easily be used as fuel, and sequestering it underground.
Of course it is not a complete solution to global warming. But it is something we should encourage people to do.
At the very top: "It’s usually made from petroleum, which is better in a landfill than in a tank of gasoline"
"It" being plastic. The common non-plant-based kind.
And later: "If we're going to extract carbon from the ground at all, far better that it ends up in a soda bottle that will last 400 years than in the combustion chamber of your car."
It's good if there is more demand for non-plant-based plastic, because then we burn less fossil fuel.
>It is dumped in whichever way is cheapest and easiest
The most common way plastic is disposed of is in a landfill. The carbon is being sequestered underground, in other words.
Pumping oil into a landfill wouldn't be sequestering carbon, so I'm not sure why pumping oil, processing it into plastics, shipping it all over, and then dumping it in a landfill would be.
If that were the only thing that matters then the deepwater horizon oil spill would have been great, but there's much more to protecting the environment than CO2.
> You could do that by pumping oil into a landfill in a way that it can't be burned
It was, it's been their for hundreds of millions of years.
Keep in mind that still significant portions of (fossil based) plastic waste are incinerated as well. And scale matters: in the country where I live roughly 30kg of plastic waste is per person per year. That's in the order of magnitude of a single tank of gas of a small vehicle. In other words: the sustainability problem with current-day plastics is not so much in it's carbon footprint, but more the damaging effect to various ecosystems and human health.
That's most plastic though. Your average soda bottle is not biodegradable on any meaningful timescale.
As the article puts it: "If we're going to extract carbon from the ground at all, far better that it ends up in a soda bottle that will last 400 years than in the combustion chamber of your car."