What Do Climate Change and Plastic Straws Have in Common? a report from the Green Life (https://www.sierraclub.org)

 

What Do Climate Change and Plastic Straws Have in Common?

Hint: Fracking for gas

Illustration: istock/AlenaLebedeva

By Jason Mark

September 14, 2022

In a fractured America, here's one thing most of us can agree on: Disposable plastic sucks. Eight in 10 voters support policies to reduce single-use plastics, and two-thirds of US residents say they'd pay more for everyday materials that don't contain plastic. Picking up plastic litter remains the go-to Earth Day activity, and "Is This Recyclable?" might as well be the latest environmentalist parlor game.

The concerns about plastic make perfect sense. While carbon dioxide and methane are invisible—and extinction is an actual disappearing act—plastic is all too tangible. The cookie packages and water bottles, single-use baggies and flimsy cheese wrappers are inescapable. They are the emblem of wanton waste, the signature of a throwaway society.

At the same time, the popular angst over plastic sometimes strikes me as a distraction from bigger environmental problems. In the midst of lethal heat waves, surely there are more important fights. Of course I grieve over the seabirds choked dead on bottle caps and spent lighters. But advocating for a ban on plastic straws while we're on the cusp of the sixth mass extinction can seem like the homeopathy of environmental activism—it can't hurt, but it's unlikely to help all that much.

Here's the thing, though: You can draw a straight line between those single-use straws and the fossil fuels that are cranking up the planet's thermostat. That straw is at the tail end of an industrial network that connects petrochemical facilities to pipelines, pipelines to compressor stations, and compressor stations to drilling rigs that fracture the earth. Plastic pollution isn't just a symbol of a wasteful society; it's the final effluent in a chain of destruction.

In "The Titans of Plastic," Kristina Marusic investigates the various ways in which plastics production threatens public health and environmental well-being. Plastics manufacturing is a significant driver of climate change, as the US plastics industry annually emits greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions from 116 coal-fired power plants. Its production is a health risk to people who live near the manufacturing sites, which release volatile organic compounds and particulate matter that contribute to respiratory diseases, birth defects, and cancer. The base components of disposable plastic—tiny pellets called nurdles—are now the second-largest source of ocean micropollutants after tire rubber.

Most maddening is how truly unnecessary all of it is. The plastics boom is a classic case of big business manufacturing a demand for the needless. Awash in a glut of oil and gas from the fracking fields and facing decreasing enthusiasm for their products as renewable energies and electric vehicles increase in market share, the fossil fuel giants are looking to plastic to sustain their revenues. "You have to drill the wells to support the petrochemical plant, but you also have to build the petrochemical plant in order to keep drilling the wells," one source told Marusic. "It's like a Ponzi scheme."

There are a number of downstream solutions to plastic pollution. Individual households can try their best to avoid single-use plastics in the first place (a tough act) and to recycle as much as possible (in some places, an even tougher act). Governments can put in place producer responsibility laws that require corporations to carry the costs of disposal, creating a market incentive to produce less (Maine and Oregon are already moving in this direction).

The most durable solution is to go upstream, to the source of plastic pollution—which leads right to the oil and gas rigs. The efforts to break America's addiction to fossil fuels and rid us of our disposable-plastic habit are intertwined. Every wellhead that's prevented and every pipeline that's halted raises the petrochemical companies' cost of doing business by making their raw materials scarcer, which makes cheap plastic a little bit more expensive to create.

Disposable plastic is the ultimate false need: We can find ways to live without it. The fossil fuel giants' profit margins can't.

Jason Mark is the editor of Sierra .

A brilliant article, this is the line of action that needs to be taken! At the end of the day, the whole mess we find ourselves in can be put down to money.  It is all about making a profit, "stuff the environment, we don't care about our children and their childrens future, we shall just leave them a great big stinking pile of crap."

The blog song for today is: " Heartbreaker" by Led Zeppelin

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Being paid to recycle - Swedish Style - a report from: https://swedishcleantech.com/news/recycling-and-waste/

     

Why are waste bins equipped with e-smart sensor devices beneficial for the environment? And how do you order a carton of milk on your phone? Swedish cleantech companies have the answers to these and other questions. Their technical solutions may be crucial when it comes to maximizing the sorting necessary to transform waste flows into resources under a circular economy.

Everyone knows this: many raw materials are finite resources, and we will need to reuse them many times over if we are to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement. Despite this, we still incinerate our waste, or even worse, bury it in landfills. This is not only a huge waste of materials but also risks emitting both carbon dioxide and toxins into the environment and atmosphere.

But today, many simple, technical solutions are available to facilitate sorting, which is a prerequisite for recycling. An example of this is an app developed by the Swedish technology company Bower that makes it possible to redeem the deposit on many different types of packaging without the need for further investments in infrastructure.

– All that is required is a package with a barcode, a phone and our app, explains Suwar Mert, founder and CEO of Bower.

– No special machines and or extra logistics are needed.

Deposit stations in the Bower app

It works like this: you take the used packaging to a recycling or environmental station, and the app uses the phone’s navigation system to verify that you are located at an approved recycling centre. You then scan the barcode on the packaging and points are added to your account. Points that can then, for example, be converted into money.

­­­­– If the packaging comes from one of our partners, say Unilever, you are given two points, if it comes from another supplier, you are given one point. The important thing here is that we accord waste products a value so that the consumer is incentivized to return rather than discard them.

But the manufacturer is also granted value, in the form of more data on how consumers use their products.

– The app can also be used to ask consumers questions, allowing the manufacturer to gain new insights into consumer habits. In addition, our solution can be installed regardless of the country because it utilizes the existing infrastructure. This makes it feasible to introduce a deposit scheme at short notice, thereby increasing sorting and recycling, in many more places and for a lot more items than previously.

In Sweden, Bowers’ country of origin, recycling stations for glass, cardboard, plastic packaging etc., are distributed throughout all municipalities. This means that it is convenient and easy for people to return packaging for recycling. However, if residents are to be comfortable using these recycling stations it is necessary that they be kept clean and tidy. Unfortunately, this is not always the case and visitors are met with dirt and overflowing containers. To remedy this, Bintel, another Swedish environmental technology company, has begun equipping waste bins with sensors.

­– The data the sensors generate makes it possible to address three separate problems, says Bintel CEO, Michael Wictor.

Michael Wictor, CEO at Bintel

– Firstly, you can streamline logistics. Instead of emptying waste containers on a fixed schedule, you can do this as needed, which makes it possible to optimize transportation. Secondly, you avoid overfilled waste containers and foul-smelling environmental stations, which makes using the facility far more pleasant, and encourages people to do the right thing, which steps up the recycling rate. Thirdly, you can easily track the fill levels in the waste containers and see how these fluctuate if, for example, you are running a targeted information campaign.

And although all these three aspects are important, there is no doubt which of them Michael Wictor thinks has the most potential.

– We must of course reduce our consumption, but we must also stop incinerating waste streams and emitting vast quantities of carbon dioxide unnecessarily. When we equip the containers with sensors and use the data this gives us to trim the way we deal with the waste we are able to ramp up sorting, which leads to more waste being collected rather than incinerated. In addition, we remove plastics from residual waste and that is what makes the big difference in carbon dioxide emissions.

So far, Bintel is located in Scandinavia, Finland, Germany, Belgium, Italy and Croatia and has approximately 11,000 sensors deployed.

– But we have only just started because we are on a global mission. We will build the company as big as we can because the bigger we get, the more we can utilize our technology to make the world a better place. The big challenge now is to develop our AI solution which will allow us to automate data processing – when we succeed in doing that, we will be able to scale this up for real.

Text: Karin Aase.

This system is similar to the one we have here on Menorca, the one here however, doesn't work very well, it only covers big brands like coca cola, which means to get points you have to carry on supporting them and they are the worst polluters in the world. It doesn't seem to be stopping the vicious circle.

I don't know if it is the case, but it seems like they are encouraging people to buy these products more so they can make money, but we should be making these large companies stopping using plastic. It seems like an underhand way to get more sales in the name of recyclying. We should be using up what we have not giving the large companies a green light to make more.  

The worst thing for me is that in order for us to try and keep all this waste from polluting the planet even more, we have to pay people to do what they should be doing anyway. What a sad state of affairs.

The blog song for today is: " The rain" by Oran 'juice' Jones

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