05 May 2011: Analysis
Facing the Dirty Truth
About Recyclable Plastics
The recyclable plastic bags you get at the green grocer are not biodegradable. But product life-cycle assessments, which are about to become more prominent in the marketplace, fail to consider whether those bags will break down in landfills or just end up as litter.
On a visit to India a while back I came upon a fenced empty field that was practically buried in flimsy white throwaway plastic bags, the kind you carry your purchases home in from the store. The locals joked that this was “the garden where plastic bags grew.”
But when I returned to India last month, I was pleasantly surprised to find that now when you shop in New Delhi, no store will give you a plastic bag for your purchases. They’re illegal there, as well as in many other Indian cities and states.
That puts India well ahead of most of the world when it comes to this particular ecological issue. Most everywhere in the U.S., for instance, the throwaway plastic bag remains the ubiquitous way people haul their stuff home from the local store. But those bags never biodegrade into anything that nature can use again.
Worse, the vast majority of such single-use plastic items never get recycled, and even “degradable” plastics may not degrade all that well. On top of that, product life-cycle assessments, which are on the verge of becoming more commonly available and used in the marketplace, do not include either litter or biodegradability as factors.
The news on some once-promising plastic alternatives is not so encouraging. A review published last month in Environmental Science and Technology by a group of scientists — one at the polymer science division of the Indian Institute of Technology — finds that “degradable
The news on once-promising plastic alternatives is not so encouraging.polyethylenes,“ used in one type of “recyclable” plastic bags, do not really disintegrate back into nature. The polyethylenes in the plastic bags studied are made by adding metals like iron and cobalt to the mix of ethylene polymers, to speed up their oxidation. But while such hybrid plastic bags once discarded do, indeed, break into fragments relatively quickly, those shreds seem to persist for a long time. No one knows just how long — the number of long-term studies is zero.
Perhaps the most dramatic example of how oil and water don’t mix can be found in the middle of the planet’s great oceans and seas in the form of litter gyres, rotating currents laden with countless bits of floating debris, mainly plastic and Styrofoam, all of which were pushed to the middle of these great bodies of water by the currents that circle them.
While the so-called Eastern Garbage Patch at the center of the Pacific has received the most media attention, every great sea now has such a gyre, a rotating ring laden with plastics. The plastic in a gyre eventually breaks down into small bits, called nurdles, which never mix with water. Marine life at the heart of a gyre, reportedly, can subsist (or perish) on a diet of many times more nurdles than krill.
Pitcairn Island, in the middle of the Pacific, offers a particularly poignant testimonial to the toxic impacts of the plastic debris whirling about at the center of our seas. Albatrosses from all over come to these islands to breed and raise their babies. Plastic bottle caps, like those atop kids’ juice containers, are plucked out of the water by albatrosses and fed to their fledglings, killing them.
All this has led me to rethink an OpEd I co-authored in the New York Times two years ago, with an industrial ecologist, Gregory Norris. Using the tools and metrics of his craft, we computed the eco-math over their
Our analysis gave too little weight to the end-of-life consequences of plastic bottles.entire life cycles to calculate whether a reusable steel water bottle was better or worse for the planet than single-use plastic water bottles. The computations on trade-offs compared their relative impacts. The steel bottle required seven times as much fossil fuel as a single plastic bottle, released 14 times more greenhouse gases, used hundreds of times more metal resources, and posed far more toxic risk to people and ecosystems.
We compared these to the “costs” of the plastic bottle in fuels, energy and emissions. This led us to determine a tipping point: If you were persistent enough to replace 500 plastic water bottles by instead refilling the steel bottle, the steel was the better choice. But now I feel our life cycle analysis gave too little weight to the end-of-life consequences of plastic bottles.
Steel is infinitely recyclable with a robust market. Most single-use plastic — like those shopping bags as well as water bottles — never gets recycled. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) tells us that only about 9 percent of plastic bags are ever recycled in the U.S. And a mere 7 percent of all plastics end up being recycled (which would allow a true “cradle-to-cradle” reuse).
“Litter is a blind spot in the LCA [life cycle assessment] world,” Gregory Norris said, when I recently raised this issue with him. “A few industrial ecologists have talked about the need to make this a standard category in LCAs — there’s no reason it couldn’t be.”
Norris suggests this would require a further step, specifically a working group to do some “fate modeling” of products like plastics, zeroing in on their end-of-life impacts. “If we did fate modeling for plastic bags and bottles,” Norris added, “that might mobilize the plastic industry and their B2B [business-to-business] customers to solve this problem.” Tim Grant,
Environmental groups are lobbying for laws that curtail or ban single-use plastic bags.an industrial ecologist at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Australia, has been raising the issue for a decade. With Karli James of the Sustainable Products division of RMIT, Grant published a demonstration of life cycle assessments on the varieties of shopping bags — paper, standard, and degradable. The LCA compared bags made with six types of degradable polymers (ranging from those made mainly from corn starch, to those with 30 percent starch from cassava plants) with bags made from materials like cotton and paper, including those made from the materials evaluated in the Environmental Science and Technology article published last month. However, the question of biodegradability was not answered by the RMIT study; the article was simply a theoretical demonstration that such a life-cycle assessment could be done.
Including plastic litter in product life cycle assessments may seem a trivial matter. But given the growing interest in making this assessment data transparent and more readily available in the consumer and business-to-business marketplace, this small step could have major impacts. In a world where transparent LCA comparisons could begin to substantially shift purchasing decisions, the inclusion of a litter metric becomes consequential.
In the meantime, nonprofits like the Plastics Pollution Coalition (PPC) are pursuing other strategies. The coalition is campaigning to inspire individuals to refuse single-use plastics and reduce their overall plastic footprint; to urge manufacturers to own the entire lifecycle of plastic products; and to persuade policy makers to formulate regulations like the legislation in Germany that makes companies responsible for their waste, which has boosted plastic recycling rates to 60 percent.
A fourth strategy: to encourage polymer scientists to develop viable bioplastics. “None of the alternatives are what they should be,” Daniella Russo, the PPC’s executive director, says. “For an alternative plastic to succeed, it should be non-toxic over its entire life cycle, fully biodegradable in all situations, and cost competitive.”
MORE FROM YALE e360
Pervasive Plastics: Why New,
Tighter Controls Are Needed
READ MORE
But on my return to the U.S. from Delhi, I stopped on the way from the airport to pick up some groceries for the next day at a “green” branch of a national supermarket chain. Coming directly from the airport, I didn’t have my reusable shopping bags with me — and so ended up lugging groceries home in three single-use plastic bags.
POSTED ON 05 May 2011 IN Forests Science & Technology Asia North America
ABOUT THE AUTHORDaniel Goleman is the author of Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything. A longtime contributor to the New York Times, he also wrote the best-selling book, Emotional Intelligence. In previous articles for Yale Environment 360, he examined the promise of a sustainability index and efforts by companies to make their products more sustainable.
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COMMENTS
Great article, but a factual error needing correction. The debris in the gyres does NOT break down into "nurdles." Just the opposite, nurdles are the raw plastic resin pellets that are at the start of plastic production. Chemically open, they absorb very concentrated amounts of, DDT, Hopanes, PCB, etc. These chemicals enter the food chain as pernicious little bombs, looking very much like eggs.. By their numbers they are the most ubiquitous pieces of marine plastic pollution. Please go to http://plasticforever.blogspot.com >> search>> nurdles.
A bit off-topic, but do you have an LCA for reusable plastic bottles or glass bottles? I think it would be great if we could compare all the options.
Steel water bottles are used mainly perhaps because of the health benefit of not having estrogenic plastics hold your water. It turns out even non-bysphenol-A containers give off endocrine disrupters.
Incidentally, nurdles are the pre-production plastic pellets used to make almost all plastic products. They can appear to be krill or fish eggs, so small fish eat them. It's true that broken down plastic debris can also look like krill or fish eggs. Toxins adhere to plastic and move up the food chain in magnified quantities.
While it is important to spread the word that plastic is barely recyclable, and that biodegradable plastics don't really biodegrade (unless conditions are just right, and IF there is no petroleum content in the mix), a more comprehensive approach to dealing with the plastic plague is to boycott petroleum.
And if we are bringing long-distance products home to our kitchen in reusable cloth bags, we have still done much damage to the environment and we used dwindling petroleum -- unless the products were brought by sail power or pedal power.
- Jan Lundberg, independent oil industry analyst, http://CultureChange.org
Big companies should provide paper bags or use bioplastic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioplastic
Daniels appreciation for India is welcome but the truth is that we are still far away from a complete ban on plastic bags. Here, in the city of Pune, a ban passed last year could not be enforced for more than two months. The largest distributors of plastic bags here are the new 'malls' that have sprouted up everywhere and you can see people walking out with ten to fifteen bags at a time.
The biodegradable alternatives are expensive or unavailable - cloth, canvas, paper - cornstarch is only just arriving. We see malls offering so called 'recyclable bags' that are basically just woven plastic - albeit sturdier than the thinner variety. Ironically, plastic carry bags are one item that consumers can actually choose to avoid, most food comes so heavily wrapped in plastic that you carry home a lot of plastic anyway even if you dont carry a plastic bag!
The solution lies in a ban that is supported with accessible and affordable biodegradable alternatives - you cant have one without the other for this to work! At least the word is spreading in India....
A multipronged approach is best.
1. Start asking for Oxo-Biodegradable polythene bags instead of simple polythene bags. At any rate it will degrade faster than the other.
2. Carry a cloth bag for shopping.
3. Keep pushing for ban on ordinary polythene bags.
4. A tonne of plastic can easily destroy about 10 acres of agricultural land. The problem is we will not know until the land is already destroyed.
5. A very huge quantity of it is landing in the oceans for sure. Who can catch the culprits? None, because the ocean belongs to no country.
Let's face it, we're doomed ;-)
With all due respect to everyone suggesting degradable plastics and other high-tech solutions, isn't the real solution simply education about bag reuse (and corresponding incentives to support the right behavior)? I suspect that in full LCA, there is minimal difference between a bag made of hemp, oxo-degradable, cornstarch, paper, or good ol' poly. I say whatever they're made from, reuse 'em as often as possible.
And with all due respect to the supporters of degradable plastics - my gut tells me that these are sending the wrong message to the "Joe Sixpack" consumer... that disposability is "OK" as long as science has given them an out. I fear that they are a distraction and ultimately counterproductive.
Excellent article on Plastics. In India there are effective steps to avoid the usage of plastic bags. What is needed is a strong silk bag which is foldable and which can be put in a pocket or vanity bag. I saw such bags in China which withstand sizeable weight.
Dr.A.Jagadeesh Nellore (AP), India
E-mail: anumakonda.jagadeesh@gmail.com
The bottom line is people, everything we make has an impact. Let's not make cars, motorcycles, boats, or fuel (gasoline). Let's be Green. No more plates, lets use banana leafs, toilet paper bad, lets use corn husk. Shoes very bad high carbon foot print, lets use dead animals skin. Airplane no way, lets ride a horse.
My favorite Disneyland carbon foot print this monster produces waste from amusement parks to toys, marketing, clothing, movies etc. Its carbon foot print is off the chart.
So my friends stop working, stop advancing. Let the good old days of no life luxury back. Amen!
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