But that quantity pales in comparison with the amount that the World Economic Forum expects will be floating into the oceans by the middle of the century.
If we keep producing (and failing to properly dispose of) plastics at predicted rates, plastics in the ocean will outweigh fish pound for pound in 2050, the nonprofit foundation said in a report Tuesday.
According to the report, worldwide use of plastic has increased 20-fold in the past 50 years, and it is expected to double again in the next 20 years. By 2050, we’ll be making more than three times as much plastic stuff as we did in 2014.
Meanwhile, humans do a terrible job of making sure those products are reused or otherwise disposed of: About a third of all plastics produced escape collection systems, only to wind up floating in the sea or the stomach of some unsuspecting bird. That amounts to about 8 million metric tons a year — or, as Jenna Jambeck of the University of Georgia put it to The Washington Post in February, “Five bags filled with plastic for every foot of coastline in the world.”
The report came a day before the start of the glitzy annual meeting arranged by the World Economic Forum to discuss the global economy. This year’s meeting in Davos, Switzerland, is centered on what the WEF terms “the fourth industrial revolution” — the boom in high-tech areas like robotics and biotechnology — and its effect on the widening gulf between the wealthy and the world’s poor.
Your cotton tote is pretty much the worst replacement for a plastic bag
By Zoe Schlanger for Quartz, 04-01-19
If you’re trying to contribute as little as possible to the two global calamities of climate change and the swirling gyres of forever-materials slowly filling our oceans, there’s a useful formula to keep in mind: Use fewer things, many times, and don’t buy new ones.
But are plastic bags better or worse than paper? And what about a cotton tote? Let’s rip this bandaid off right away: There’s no easy answer.
To understand the impact of reusable bags on the environment, one has to hold two very different things in mind. One: Plastic bags do not biodegrade and are stuffing the oceans, marine life, and our food supply with plastic bits. Two: Considering all the other environmental impacts besides litter, a cotton tote or a paper bag may be worse for the environment than a plastic one.
In a 2018 life-cycle assessment, Denmark’s ministry of environment and food agreed with previous similar studies, finding that classic plastic shopping bags have the least environmental impact. This assessment does not take marine litter into account—so as far as that gigantic problem is concerned, plastics are almost certainly the worst, since they don’t break down on a timescale meaningful to human or animal life.
But when taking into account other factors, like the impact of manufacturing on climate change, ozone depletion, water use, air pollution, and human toxicity, those classic, plastic shopping bags are actually the most benign of the current common options.
The technical name for the wispy plastic bags, like the ones you might get at the grocery store or deli, are low-density polyethylene (LDPE) bags.
The table below, using data from the Denmark study, compares the environmental performance of LDPE bags to other bags, assuming that the LDPE bags are reused once as a trash bin liner before being incinerated (incineration is the best possible disposal for these bags, according to the report).
Cotton bags must be reused thousands of times before they meet the environmental performance of plastic bags—and, the Denmark researchers write, organic cotton is worse than conventional cotton when it comes to overall environmental impact. According to the report, organic cotton bags have to be reused many more times than conventional cotton bags (20,000 versus 7,000 times), based on the assumption that organic cotton has a 30% lower yield rate on average than conventional cotton, and therefore was assumed to require 30% more resources, like water, to grow the same amount.
Even adjusting for the benefits of organic cotton production—like less fertilizer and pesticide use (and therefore less eutrophication and water contamination caused by growing it)—conventional cotton came out on top.
The report also assumed the cotton could not be recycled, since very little infrastructure exists for textile recycling.
With plastic bag bans soaring in popularity globally (127 countries have adopted plastic bag restrictions, and New York just passed one this week), the question of what will replace plastic bags has become more pressing. We know that single-use anything is a terrible idea, whether it is plastic or not, so replacing plastic bags with paper ones will surely have deleterious side-effects like increasing deforestation. Making a paper bag also requires more energy and water than making a plastic bag, so for other environmental considerations besides litter, paper products may be worse than plastic ones.
As the Verge pointed out last year, regardless of the bag you choose, what is likely of vastly greater importance is what you choose to put in it and how you carry it around: Eating less meat, cycling or walking to the store, and buying locally-made grocery products are all likely to make a bigger difference in lowering your personal contribution to environmental problems.
The simplest advice for individuals seems to be this: Whatever you have in your house now—be it a pile of cotton totes, or a jumble of plastic bags—don’t throw them out. Keep using them until they fall apart. Whatever the material, use it as a garbage bag once you can’t use it for other purposes any more. And whatever you do, try not to buy new ones.
Plus, knowing how many resources it takes to make a piece of cotton, treat fabric items in your home like infinitely reusable resources worth their carbon-mitigating weight in gold. Find new uses for old clothes, use textiles until they wear out, and when you want something new, buy vintage.
have to use a cotton tote thousands of times to make up for its environmental impact.
Source: The best and worst replacements for the single-use plastic bag — Quartz
McDonald’s new paper straws – described as “eco-friendly” by the US fast food giant – cannot be recycled.
Last year, it axed plastic straws, even though they were recyclable, in all its UK branches as part of a green drive.
But the US fast food giant says the new paper straws are not yet easy to recycle and should be put into general waste.
McDonald’s says the materials are recyclable, but their thickness makes it difficult for them to be processed.
The firm switched from plastic straws to paper ones in its restaurants in the UK and Republic of Ireland last autumn.
The straws are manufactured by Transcend Packaging, based in Ebbw Vale, south Wales.
But some customers were unhappy with the new straws, saying they dissolved before a drink could be finished, with milkshakes particularly hard to drink.
“As a result of customer feedback, we have strengthened our paper straws, so while the materials are recyclable, their current thickness makes it difficult for them to be processed by our waste solution providers, who also help us recycle our paper cups,” a McDonald’s spokesman said.
The firm said it was working to find a solution, and that current advice, as first reported by The Sun, to put paper straws in general waste was therefore temporary.
“This waste from our restaurants does not go to the landfill, but is used to generate energy,” the company added.
A petition by irate McDonald’s customers to bring back plastic straws has so far been signed by 51,000 people.
The restaurant chain uses 1.8 million straws a day in the UK, so the move to paper was a significant step in helping to reduce single-use plastic.
This McDonald’s move to paper straws followed a successful trial in selected restaurants earlier in 2018.
In April 2018, the UK government proposed a ban on plastic straws and cotton buds in England.
Most straws are made from plastics such as polypropylene and polystyrene, which unless recycled, take hundreds of years to decompose.
Friends of the Earth’s Julian Kirby said: “For too long the debate has been stuck on recycling and how to deal with waste once it is created. We should be thinking about how to avoid waste creation.
“Lips have been a waste-free alternative to straws for millions of years.”
Source: McDonald’s paper straws cannot be recycled – BBC News
If you’ve been paying attention recently, you’ve seen businesses and cities alike are banning plastic straws due to their inability to be recycled or biodegrade at the end of their life. If plastic straws aren’t busy taking up space in our landfills, they can usually be found polluting our oceans, disrupting marine ecosystems, and trapping nearby animals. At this rate, if we don’t cut back on our plastic usage, there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050 (!!!)
So why keep using single-use plastic straws if they’re so destructive towards the environment? While many of us are unaware just how bad it is for the planet to sip that iced coffee through a straw, others don’t think that their “small” amount of waste can have an impact. The truth is, when just a little bit of trash is created by a whole lot of people, thousands of tons of waste can be produced in mere minutes.
The good news? Straws don’t have to suck. With reusable options made from glass, bamboo, stainless steel, and even compostable materials, you can have your smoothie and sip it too! Join us below as we break down “the break down” of yucky plastic straws, and give you all the facts you need to buy a truly better alternative.
Used For Minutes, Here For Centuries
Invented in 1888, the modern straw was made from just paper strips and glue to solve a common issue: the natural rye straws once used to sip whiskey left a grassy taste that the new straws did not. Flash forward a century later, and paper straws have almost been entirely replaced by their plastic counterparts, made from a chemical called polypropylene (composed of molecules of toxic propylene gas!)
Polypropylene, and plastic for that matter, is designed to withstand being submerged in water without falling apart. In other words, they’re made to last (and last they do!) This chemical substance, called “petroleum bi-product polypropylene” in full, never biodegrades and can stay in our environment for thousands of years.
Believe it or not, every plastic straw that was ever created still exists in some form today, whether it be in a landfill or the ocean. To add salt to the wound, straws are often individually packaged in unnecessary paper or plastic, and they travel huge distances from the factory, to your dinner table, and then back to the landfill. Just think of all the carbon emissions that come from simply transporting all of these flimsy straws!
Once a plastic straw is used (which is usually about one drink long), it will get thrown away and hauled off to a waste management plant–if the wind hasn’t already blown it from your trash bin and into our waterways, that is! At the waste management plant, there’s three places your straw is likely to go: the incinerator, the ground, or the landfill. While the incinerator may sound like a better option because it completely eliminates your plastic straw, it also releases yucky toxic dioxins into the air that can settle onto our crops and eventually end up stored in our bodies. Depending on your city, they are sometimes buried in the ground, leaching more chemicals into the soil and groundwater than if they were sent to the landfill. Most disposable straws, however, end up in overflowing landfills, where they remain for centuries!
If you try the recycling route for your plastic straw, you’ll be shocked to find that most centers can’t recycle straws at all. Many mechanical recycling sorters can’t identify the lightweight item, which increases the potential for them to slip through the sorter and contaminate entire recycling bundles (costing recycling plants time & money!) Despite your good intentions, it’s likely that your straw will still end up in the landfill, where it will outlive even your great, great, great grandchildren.
Garbage Patch Madness
Believe it or not, plastic straws are one of the top polluters on our beaches. Whether you recycle or toss it, the lightweight plastic can get blown by the wind into our waterways and rivers, at which point it’s nearly guaranteed that it will eventually end up in the ocean.
When trash floats around in our ocean, it often finds itself meeting other plastics in a gyre, aka a circular ocean current, where it can stay for years. The largest accumulation of trash in the world, The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, covers a surface area twice the size of Texas!
While the straws may break down in size in these gyres, the materials are with us forever, and broken down plastic isn’t necessarily a good thing. When these plastics break down into particles less than 5 millimeters in size, they become microplastics. These small plastic “crumbs” are even easier for marine life to consume, and even harder (virtually impossible) to remove from the ocean. The problem has gotten so bad that at least 100 million marine mammals are killed each year from plastic pollution alone, as well as a countless number of fish.
Source: The Lifestyle of a Plastic Straw | Zero Waste Topics | EarthHero
Target, Walmart and others are working with Closed Loop Partners on a $15 million project to explore alternatives to traditional plastic bags in the retail sector.
Closed Loop Partners, an investment firm focused on the waste and recycling sector, on July 21 announced the formation of the Consortium to Reinvent the Retail Bag. The organization was launched with early members that include CVS Health, Kroger, Target, Walgreens and Walmart.
The companies are putting $15 million toward what they are calling the “Beyond the Bag Initiative.”
The project, which is part of Closed Loop Partners’ Center for the Circular Economy, says its goal is to identify, test and implement “viable design solutions and models that more sustainably serve the purpose of the current retail bag.”
In their announcement, the stakeholders acknowledged this is not the first effort to tackle plastic bag design. But they pointed to shortcomings in efforts to date.
“Current alternatives to the plastic retail bag have yet to garner industry-wide support or widespread use by the public and many still have significant environmental impacts,” the project partners stated.
Single-use plastic bags have generated ire for their tendency to end up as litter in the environment, leading numerous municipalities to ban their use in the retail sector. According to the bag initiative announcement, more than 100 billion single-use plastic retail bags are used in the U.S. alone each year, and less than 10% of these are recycled. Bags are rarely accepted in curbside recycling programs, because they typically cause problems during the sorting process at recycling centers.
They are also, by and large, made from virgin plastic, although major bag producers recently signed a voluntary commitment to use greater percentages of recycled content in the years to come. California is the only U.S. state to mandate recycled plastic inclusion in thicker, reusable plastic bags distributed in the state.
In a statement to Resource Recycling, Closed Loop Partners noted that the initiative could look into reusable bags or altogether bagless models, as well as alternative material choices. Greater recycled plastic inclusion in any of these systems is “one of many potential options that could be assessed, among others,” the organization stated.
In the announcement, major retailer Kroger tied its interest in bag alternatives to its in-progress work to phase out single-use bags across all its stores.
“We encourage other retailers to join us in this commitment and bid farewell to the single-use plastic bag for good,” said Keith Dailey, Kroger’s vice president of corporate affairs.
The bag initiative is bringing in Ocean Conservancy and Conservation International as “environmental advisory partners to provide critical perspective on environmental impacts and solutions” during the project.
Beyond the Bag is a three-year initiative and is also looking to bring in additional retailers, according to the announcement.
Advocacy group As You Sow released a statement describing the initiative as “encouraging,” but also calling on the involved companies to act faster and take greater action to address packaging waste.
Target, Walmart and others are working with Closed Loop Partners on a $15 million project to explore alternatives to traditional plastic bags in the retail sector. Closed Loop Partners, an investment firm focused on the waste and recycling sector, on …Continue Reading→
Source: Retailers look to ‘reinvent’ single-use plastic bags – Resource Recycling
For more than a decade bioplastics have, essentially, been a giant lab experiment. Plastics made from plants hold a lot of promise, given that most consumer plastic on the market today is derived from petroleum—which we would much rather keep in the ground. Some bioplastics have even been turned into garbage bags, bottles, and straws available for purchase by any company or individual who seek them out. Still, only 2% of the world’s 300 million tons of plastic production comes from plants, according to Lux Research.
But now, prices for bioplastics are plunging to that of conventional plastics, and manufacturers are finally ready to swap out petroleum for plants. The result is that most of the the expected doubling (pdf) of the global plastic productions over the next 20 years could come from plants.
“Multinational corporations are now the key driver commercializing bio-based products,” writes Victor Oh, a bio-materials analyst at Lux Research by email. In September, the furniture giant Ikea announcedit is shifting to “renewable, bio-based materials;” it plans to launch its first proof-of-concept bioplastic product next year in partnership with chemical refiner Neste. Packaging company TetraPak will roll out 100 million of its first fully biologically-derived cartons, Tetra Rex, by the end of 2016 with the aim of eventually making all its products 100% renewable. Coca-Cola Company announced a 100% bioplastic version of its “PlantBottle” after manufacturing 35 billion bottles using a 30% bio-based plastic since 2009.
Price makes it all possible, says Mike Hamilton, CEO of Renmatix, a developer of biomass alternatives to petroleum. The cost of some next-generation bioplastics are now even with those derived from oil —a milestone Renmatix says it can meet even at today’s oil price of around $50 per barrel (other companies have said their break-even figure is closer to $130, a price last seen in 2008). Their technology is attracting dollars from fossil fuel heavyweights: Renmatix says it recently struck deals with French energy giant Total and the chemical company BASF to reserve more than a million tons of biorefining capacity for use in turning trees into plastics and fuel. Renmatix also raised $14 million from investors led by Bill Gates for its first commercial biorefinery; Gates has said he sees the development of this infrastructure as a crucial part of the effort to decarbonize the industrial sector.
We have the technology. Now we need the scale.
Continue Reading: Bioplastics are getting cheap enough that they will soon be a legitimate option for massive corporations — Quartz
