The recycling myth: A plastic waste solution littered with failure
One thing I’m always curious about is why we are so concerned with plastic waste.My local grocery store recently switched to paper bags. So I got curious. Turns out you have to re-use a paper bag 43 times for the energy use to be the same as plastic grocery bags. This is impossible since they are made of paper. Aluminum and glass bottles require several hundred times more energy to produce as well (between 170-250x).Then when you look at plastic pollution and see that for the most part North America is quite good at properly disposing of plastic you wonder why we are so obsessed with this as a problem.Plastic waste really isn’t a big problem unless you’re talking about developing nations. North America is responsible for about 3% of mismanaged plastic waste. Asia and Africa account for 86% of it.Don’t get me started on plastic straws. They make up 0.03% of plastic waste in the ocean.If we want to make a difference here we should be helping developing nations to better manage their plastic waste so that it doesn’t end up in waterways.The Yangtze and Ganges are releasing plastic into the ocean at a rate far greater than all of North America combined, and our response is to expend huge amounts of energy produced by fossil fuels trying to recycle our plastic instead of burying it in a landfill where it is unlikely to pose a major ecological threat.Like many environmental initiatives I worry that we’re more concerned about making ourselves feel better than actually solving the problem.