Plastic, Plastic Everywhere

Plastic is everywhere. Much of it is meant for a single use, a single moment in time before being disposed of--hopefully recycled but more likely landfilled. Take a look around your house or office and note all the plastics: grocery bags, frozen vegetable bags, take-out containers and utensils, bread bags. Heck, even the bananas have plastic stickers with cartoon characters on them. The pineapple has a plastic tag attached with another piece of plastic. Candy wrappers, condiment packets, deliveries from Amazon, every new item you peel free from its protective shrinkwrap.

Go for a walk and note the plastic bottles, fast-food cups and straws, poo bags, and other waste that finds its way onto the street and into the Greenway or other open spaces. 

It may seem as if this were always the case, the ubiquitous, useful plastic. But commercial manufacture and use of plastics only began in earnest in the 1950s, closely followed by disposable plastic convenience culture. A few decades later, as people recognized the massive amount of plastic waste being created year after year, recycling programs were rolled out in municipalities, effectively allowing the industries creating the waste to offload their responsibilities to taxpayers and municipal waste systems. 

The normal take is: you make a mess, you clean the mess--right? Most of us learned this as children. But somehow the plastic manufacturers and other industries have skirted that norm, instead creating a bigger and bigger mess every year without taking any responsibility for cleaning up after themselves. 

As our country produced and consumed more single-use plastic items, we began shipping it overseas, where less wealthy countries happily accepted our trash, for a price. We, consciences clear, assumed our plastic was sent off to be happily recycled into new and useful plastic products. But alas, less than 10% of all that plastic waste is actually recycled; another 12% is incinerated (1), and much of the rest ends up in landfills, greenways, rivers, oceans, seabirds' stomachs, human placentas...generally places it shouldn't be.

So we continue manufacturing and using plastic, and the past year has been a doozy with fears about virus transmission leading many businesses to replace reusable materials with single-use disposable items made from plastic. So much plastic that Iowa City has stopped accepting plastic clamshells in recycling bins because they cannot be recycled. The city gamely offered suggestions to reuse and repurpose those clamshell containers to store notions or share cookies, but those who are trying to support local restaurants buy ordering take-out are likely going to be overflowing with clamshells within a couple of months.(2)

The answer is not at the end of the product's life but at the beginning, and not with individuals making better choices but with an extended producer responsibility paradigm. We can't recycle our way out of the mess the plastics industry has created for us: we need to address the issue upstream, at the point of manufacture, and the responsibility to safely and effectively dispose of these products must be pushed back onto those creating and profiting from those products. 

Fortunately, there is legislation designed to do exactly this, and more, at a national level. The Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act would require plastic packaging producers to be responsible for collecting and recycling the waste they create, including a nationwide "bottle bill" (which is itself an example of an effective and successful producer responsibility program), invest in domestic recycling and composting infrastructure (sounds like job creation to me!), prevent the US from exporting its plastic waste to countries that don't have the ability to suitably recycle it, and many other policies to rein in our glut of plastics.

You can learn more about this legislation, and how to effectively lobby your members of Congress on its behalf, at a free weekly webinar sponsored by Beyond Plastics. Sign up to hear about the connection between fracking and plastics, the effect on health and social justice, and how we can make our country a better steward of our environment with an economy that appropriately prices and manages its plastic waste.

It's not easy to change the trajectory we've been on for the past 70 years, and it certainly won't be easy to force an industry to assume responsibility for the damage it has done, and continues to do. But clearly something must be done: a glance around your house, a walk along the Greenway,

(1) National Geographic: A Whopping 91 Percent of Plastic Isn’t Recycled

(2) Although several local businesses have taken the initiative to use compostable containers and utensils and should be commended for their efforts!