Canada declares plastics toxic, paving the way for restrictions
There is a lot of misleading and false statements in this article.<p>They claim plastic recycling doesn&#x27;t work. It&#x27;s true that most plastic isn&#x27;t recycled, but that&#x27;s because of lackluster government involvement, not some technological barrier.<p>British Columbia has the most sophisticated recycling equipment in North America. Two plants there first use lasers to identify different types of plastic (PP, HDPE, PET, etc) in the incoming stream and then use air blasts to categorize it.<p>These streams are then separated by color. The material then goes to a plastics reclamation facility where the material is shredded, washed, dried, melted and forced through a filter, and turned to pellet.<p>The result is that 74% of plastic beverage containers in BC are recycled. Why isn&#x27;t this done elsewhere? It&#x27;s because BC has a tax on plastic packaging, and this tax money is then used to subsidize the loss from converting recyclables into new plastic pellet (the cost is higher than the revenue). And other governments don&#x27;t want to do it, partly due to lobbying from plastics packaging manufacturers.<p>Plastic recycling does work when society wants it to. But instead we turn to paper. Paper produces double the CO2 emissions of plastic, and it requires vastly more energy: a European study showed that switching to paper in Europe would consume 57% more energy and 61% more greenhouse gases from packaging than are produced today. In a world where human existence is threatened most likely from runaway climate change, this seems like a bad idea.<p>And while we&#x27;re so focused on transitioning plastic packaging to paper, we ignore the real problem with plastic in the oceans: plastic netting dumped from illegal fishing. Plastic netting wraps around animals and drowns or suffocates them. It can also drag along a seabed, killing the seabed life.<p>But this is considered a difficult problem to solve (international waters, policing is difficult, etc) so we ignore it.<p>The idea policy would be:<p>1. Tax plastic packaging. Use the tax money to pay for recycling that works, which has been proven to work.<p>2. Develop international treaties and enforcement mechanisms to prevent illegal fishing and find ways to reduce fish consumption.<p>3. Implement carbon taxes that reflect the cost to human survival imposed by any kind of packaging, or other activity, in accordance with the degree of GHG emission.