When I was boy growing up on Long Island in the 1950s, there were no plastics and no plastic wastes. That is difficult for Generation X and Z folks to imagine. But in those days, not so long ago, our bread came in its own brown crust, meat left the butcher in heavy waxed paper, fish was often wrapped in yesterday’s newsprint, and cold drinks were sold in a glass bottle. All soaps were sold as solid bars that were wrapped in paper. That array of plastic bottles and tubes for shampoos, colorings, and conditioners lined up on your shower shelf simply didn’t exist. Toothpaste in those awkward plastic tubes were no problem (for us)—
we had none—and used a dry dentifrice powder that was purchased in a small cardboard box.
My grandfather lived on a small holding in the countryside where we had no garbage collection. None was needed. All our kitchen waste was fed to the dogs, the chickens, or pigs, or composted in the garden. Any “packaging” was either reused, like glass bottles (for “canning vegetables or fruits”), or if paper, it was burned to start a fire in the kitchen wood stove. Tin cans were used to store useful “stuff” in the shed, like old rusty nails, nuts and bolts, fish hooks, fishing lures, old bailing wire, string, even a ball of rare aluminum foil. When we had no more use for tin cans we crushed them flat and dumped them in the trash pit for burial among the broken glass jars, bits of shattered ceramics, and other really useless “waste”. Grandpa’s “landfill” waste pit was dug four feet deep and no bigger than a wash tub. and I had never seen it full. But I know for sure there were no plastics in there.
We did have a brown “plastic” substance called Bakelite, and of course some cellophane….but no clear, colorful plastic bags containers and packaging like that which overwhelms us today.
Then too, we were not visually assaulted by discarded plastic bags fluttering in our trees or bushes, or empty cast off plastic bottles rolling around in the gutter, or the myriad colors and fragments of plastic junk that now float up onto the strand lines on our beaches. There were no plastic wastes ( no consumer packaging) to casually throw away or somehow escape into the environment. Today those of us who actually separate our garbage for collection, are aware that the stuff we wanted to consume or use is encased in plastic—bottles, various containers and packaging —which constitute three times the volume of the actual products within. And the vast majority of it is plastic!
So what is this plastic stuff that is so common? The word, like many of in our language is from the Greek. ”Plastikos” (πλαστικός) in Greek means a solid substance that can change its shape or be deformed. This characteristic to change shape is what gave our modern “plastics” their name. Plastics are light in weight, chemically stable and most importantly can be heated and then molded into almost any shape, from a complex solid, to a thin transparent or translucent film, or to be spun into a micro thin fiber to be woven with others into a fabric, a fishing line, a rope, or a ship’s hawser.
Modern day commercial “plastics”are part of a group of chemicals known as polymers. These substances are composed of repeating similar units called “monomers” each bound together into long chains called polymers. . Polymers can occur naturally or be man-made. There are many naturally occurring polymers. Cellulose which is produced by plants as a support tissue is a natural polymer formed from chains of glucose molecules . Other natural polymers are the DNA molecule, and proteins, like egg albumin. Fatty acids are monomers which combine in the body to form polymers called triglycerides. Other polymers occurring in nature are natural shellac, amber, and even petroleum itself which is a mixture of hydrocarbon polymers.
Man-made or synthetic plastics are produced by bonding together monomers derived from petroleum products or natural gas. To produce synthetic polymers like plastic, “feedstocks” from natural gas and “distillate wastes” from the oil refining process such as naphtha, ethylene, and propylene are used to produce the vast quantities of plastics now in use. These monomers are bonded together by heat, pressure and chemical catalysts (in a process termed polymerization) to form the various plastic polymers.
Variations in monomer chemistry can change the properties of the plastic end-product. If the carbon chain has the element chlorine in its monomer line-up, the resulting polymer may be termed a “polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastic”. PVC is white and brittle and is often used in plumbing as “PVC pipe”. It is also used to form ducts, roofing, flooring, cladding for structures, and coating for wires and cables. The slippery polymer “Teflon” is made up of carbon chain monomers with the element fluorine bound to some of the carbon atoms. Other polymers use ethylene as the unit monomer and combine this with a salt of terephtalic acid to produce the polymer polyethylene terepthalate or PET. This polymer plastic is one of the most common. It is a clear, strong and lightweight plastic used to make innumerable soft drink, water and other bottles.
Today, almost anything one buys is packaged in plastics. One often needs a good pair of pliers and a strong scissor just to get at product you actually purchased on the inside. Even bulk items like wood chips and garden mulch are packed in huge, thick, plastic bags. The bags are stacked high on wood pallets then wrapped again in hundreds of feet of yard-wide thin plastic film to keep the pallets and the bags intact. I calculated once that each pallet of organic wood chip mulch require a mass of plastic perhaps the size of a football, just to get the “organic” mulch product to your back yard. Not a good deal in terms of energy used and petroleum wasted.
The PET ( polyethylene terephalate ) bottle was patented in 1973. It was first used, to improve the sale of carbonated beverages but is now produced in unbelievably massive numbers to accommodate the “plastic throwaway culture”. Cheap plastic has encouraged and made possible the “single use then dump it culture” that is inundating the planet today. The UK science museum (sciencemuseum.org.uk) claims that 500 billion PET bottles are sold each year. That amounts to six dozen polyethylene bottles for every man, woman and child in the entire world….each and every year year. But only small fraction are actually recycled, one can only image the massive amount of waste plastics that has been generated only by this one kind of polymer over the five decades that PET has beef produced
According to the Guardian, December 1, 2021 (guardian.com.uk ) “Deluge of Plastic Waste” by Oliver Milman, the USA,
the world’s most affluent nation, generates 42 million metric tons of plastic each year. That amount represents more plastic waste than that produced by all of the thirty EU nations combined. Since 1960 plastic waste has increased almost exponentially. Today, it is often claimed that each person in the US generates almost 300 pounds of the stuff per person per year. That is about 52.5 million tons of plastic waste that is produced each year and in recent years much of it (see below) is dumped into the environment every year. According to the Guardian, USA plastic waste is almost nine times (9x) greater than other similarly “advanced” countries around the world.
Affluent US consumers purchase vast amounts of “goods” of all sorts from all over the world and almost all of it comes packed, wrapped or covered with plastic. We in the USA have become truly addicted to the use of plastics and now assume it is just normal packaging. But it is not. It takes about 450 years for a plastic PET bottle to fully degrade in a land fill. Plastics hang around a long time.
Because we generate so much “throw away” plastic, such as plastic straws, spoons and forks, dishes, packaging, bags, containers of all kinds, and components of other manufactured goods we have way too much waste to recycle. According to the Guardian, of the 52 million tons of plastic we produce annually, more than two (2) million tons leak out each year into the environment. Of that two million tons, which is scattered on land, much of it eventually enters (or is tossed) into streams and rivers and ultimately flows downstream into larger bodies of water and ultimately enters into the ocean.
But we are not alone, the rest of the world and its plastic wastes also contribute to this waste stream. About 9 million tons of waste are estimated to enter the marine environment each year. Some years ago, while on a long-distance sailing voyage across the Pacific Ocean an environmentally concerned sailor made derailed records of the floating plastics he encountered on the crossing. These data revealed a massive floating “island” of waste plastic in the Pacific Ocean, the size of the state of Texas. More recently marine biologists have studied this “Pacific Ocean plastic Sargasso Sea” for living organism. There among the floating debris they found many organisms (mussels, crabs, barnacles) of the coastal ocean which had been washed out to sea on plastic waste and have adapted to now new “plastic island” environment. Some have estimated that by 2030 the total waste accumulated in the marine environmentaccording to the Guardian article could reach 53 million tons, an amount which is roughly half of all fish caught globally from the ocean in an year.
Plastic is theoretically recyclable, but much of it, probably close 60%, is not recycled. Plastics are not a homogeneous material. Different plastics: PET, PVC, etc. all have different physical properties and melting points. If the collected plastics are not sorted properly, when heated for recycling, the resulting “melt” produces an unstable useless sludge that must be discarded.
Plastics have visual identity marks, but sorting must be done by hand, and for this reason is very time consuming. Since the product that is being sorted is of low value, to be economically profitable, large numbers must be sorted to make the process worth the effort.
Until recently, China made use of plastic waste and the rest of the world collected its used plastics and sent these wastes off to China. There, low-wage workers patiently sorted and collected the various types of plastics for recycling. But over the years, China became more affluent, and fewer and fewer low wage workers were available for plastic scavenging. Then too, the volume of throw away plastics in use spiked exponentially into enormous amounts. By 2018 there was so much plastic in the world to be recycled, that it’s value as a commodity collapsed. At that time, even in populous China there were not enough low wage workers to make recycling profitable. In 2018 China closed its ports to ships carrying plastic waste. Affluent nations were forced to send their plastic wastes to other poor nations such as Vietnam and Thailand. But soon these nations too ran out of workers and landfill space and began simply burning plastic waste or burying it in domestic landfills to cope with the massive volume. Then too when space for dumping and illegal burning became a problem, they also turned away the world’s plastic waste.
Thus those who used throwaway plastics with the comforting thought they the plastic s will be recycled were faced with the reality that they too were simply adding to their already huge carbon footprint of the “throwaway culture”. Plastics require significant amounts of fossil fuel energy to produce the polymers, additional energy is used to make the bottles or containers, and more to fill and transport the consumer product. Then when it is consumed even more to collect the plastic waste. Then this waste is sent around the world on fuel burning ships where the unsorted wastes were not recycled at all, but simply buried or burned up in the air to create more pollution of a different and often more insidious, and noxious kind.
Since plastics are produced from petroleum, and the trend in modern “green” nations is to force a decline in petroleum as a fuel, and also impose limits upon fossil fuel use, producers will be looking encourage the us of throwaways and to to sell more petroleum distillates to plastic producers. Thus, in the near future we can expect an incensed financial incentive for more, rather than less plastic pollution, desecrating our lands, our oceans, and landfills, not less.
Producers in the affluent nations with their “single-use- throwaway” culture have been so successful in selling and making their products so cheap and so common, that now a pinch of sand grains form a beach are presently more valuable than a PET bottle, and no one can afford to spend the time to sort and recycle these wastes because the new product is simply less expensive than the recycled product.
So though plastics are theoretically recyclable, right now they are simply just colorful land fill waste. Now they are chemically dangerous, accumulations of non-degradable , non-compostable , solid products that generate a huge carbon footprint just to produce and sell.
It does not have to be this way. We don’t have to go back to living like the youth of the greatest generation or the silent generation, with limited products and containers of only Bakelite and cellophane, glass and paper. If we can go to the moon on a whim, we surely can create containers and packaging that are biologically degradable.
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