The Putative Solutions to Persistent Plastic Pollution
Manual Shoreline Clean-up
I fully understand the sense of personal frustration which leads people to want
to just do something, and going and cleaning up the visible pollution and big
pieces of garbage from a beach does have some value. However, the plastic which is
doing the bulk of the damage to wildlife like shorebirds is the small pieces of
plastic (micro- and nano-plastic) which we simply don't pick-up by hand, because
they are hard for humans to see.
We have one suggestion on how to make these manual clean-up initiatives more
effective. Remove the tiny floating plastic bits with a 'float and filter' approach.
We describe this in our
'De-plasticizing the Ocean' 3-pager. (Use whatever filter you choose. We like
the ADsorb-It filter fabric because it traps oil as well as the floating plastic bits.)
'Biodegradable' Substitutes
It seems so obvious: mix organic materials with some science and a bit of
environmental flair, and we could create substitutes for all the consumer plastic which
will serve just as well as the petro-plastics for their intended uses, and then
just dissolve into natural elements with time. Except that after decades of
trying, nothing quite seems to work. Corn starch, UV-degradable plastics, weak-chain
polymers, and more. The UV-degradable materials last indefinitely if buried. Some
of the items fail prematurely. There are a wide variety of nominally biodegradeable
plastics, so it is unwise to generalize across all of them in terms for characteristics,
costs or practicality in specific applications. Viable solutions may be out there, I'm just not aware
of any being used in volume. (If you have such a self-return-to-natural-elements-quickly
but does-not-fail-prematurely solution,
let us know. We'll put up a link here so others can evaluate it.
3-D Printers
Yes, they can save on packing materials and shipping costs, but the actual material used to make the
pieces is usually a long-lasting plastic polymer, so we're back to having more plastic,
most of which is not suitable for recycling programs (and certainly will not be marked
as such in the typical home-based or low-volume production 3D printing is primarily
used for).
Shipping the Plastic Waste Somewhere Else
We keep trying this, but the reality is we only have one planet, and wherever we
ship it, it stays on the same planet we're living on. Waste plastic hide-and-seek isn't
a game we can win, and we just use more energy shuffling the stuff around, creating
more pollution and green-house gases.
Turn the Waste Plastic Back Into Oil
This one pops up pretty regularly in various guises. Technically, it is possible.
However, I have yet to see a validated study of the energy return on energy invested which
shows we get more energy from the reconstituted oil than we spent producing it, and if we
burn the reconstituted oil, it's still a fossil fuel making pollution and greenhouse gases.
This is just a guess, but if we use electricity to melt the plastic and fractionate it to
obtain a usable fluid oil to power a vehicle, I expect we would be better off (in terms
of overall efficiency and environmental impact) to just use the same electricity to charge
up an electric car and get more distance travelled without the intermediate steps.
Reuse, Repurposing
I'm a fan. I collect plastic bags and give them to thrift stores so they can provide
a bag to customers without buying more plastic bags. I refill 2-litre plastic drink bottles
with water and use them for thermal storage. I use plastic food containers to store other
foods, such as batches of spaghetti sauce and left-overs. I take windshield washer fluid
jugs back to bullk dispensing operators. I'll wash out and reuse some of the more rugged
'single-use' drink bottles. However, I recognize that these
efforts reduce the demand for more new plastic by a trivial amount, and eventually the
plastic ends up in the waste stream anyway. I also realize the majority of people don't
make this much effort. Which is why we have an annual spring event in our neighbourhood to
peel all the plastic bags off the chain-link fence downwind from an open field which is
part of an informal walking infrastructure between a housing area and a number of stores
and services.
Plastic-eating Microbes
This one comes up occasionally, and
has again recently. However, this needs to be taken with a few caveats. This particular
microbe is believed to have evolved (mutation) in a plastic waste dump. However, in order
to come up with something sufficiently effective to be useful, the scientists have modified
the mutant strain, and propose to modify it more to make it more 'effective'. We have a
large, immediate problem. This path will take years to be ready for real-world use. However,
release on beaches on seafloors certainly gives me pause. How do we tell the enhanced,
fast-plastic-eating microbes to eat only the plastic pollution, and not the existing plastic
infrastructure we want to keep? Like boats made of FRP, protective coatings on marine
cables and pipelines, car parts, telephone line insulation, power cable insulation,
fibre-optic protective covering, PVC and ABS plumbing and water-mains, vinyl siding,
food and chemical storage containers ...? We know industrial agriculture can't contain GMO food crop strains; there
is no reason to believe we can control a GMO microbe which we have intentionally released into
the wild.
Even if any of these ideas or approaches actually worked, none of these
address the exsisting pollution in the environment. For that,
we need a different way of
thinking about the problem.
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