Love this. The problem with plastic is when it does not go into landfill but ends up in waterways. Tragically, recycling often increases the risk of this as it is sold to dodgy people who just dump it instead of actually recycling it. Incinerating plastic is insane and should be banned.
What's wrong with incinerating plastic for heat/electricity generation, replacing some gas usage? Sure, it's probably not as clean or flexible as gas, but it's available.
Firstly the emissions are highly toxic, like emissions from burning coal and wood. Gas is actually MUCH much cleaner.
Secondly, it generates greenhouse gases.
The only argument in favour is that it eliminates the waste. However we don need to as putting in in landfills is safe and cheap.
I also think it is a serious mistake to burn wood for electricity. It actually released more CO2 than burning coal and the emissions are lethal. Domestic wood stoves are now the main source of harmful air pollution in many cities.
Plasma arc gasification with power generation is possible. It is expensive and although most organic compounds are broken down by the extreme heat some dioxins are still emitted.
As we get more excess oxygen from electrolysis, we should use some to oxy-incinerate it, make it into syn-gas by adding H2 and then into new products...
It would be interesting to have a quantitative comparison of the toxicity of gas versus waste. I agree, this is a big issue.
However, especially in Europe, I think it may be beneficial to avoid using coal and gas by using waste instead. We know that gas unfortunately comes at a great geopolitical cost (it wouldn't have to, but it does), so there can be an argument where the increased toxicity of waste is still worth the tradeoff.
I fully agree on wood not being a good source of electricity.
Of course Europe could crack for its own gas. It makes not sense to ban fracking and instead burn wood and waste. Nuclear power is of course the best option for reliable clean electricity. Decades of misinformation have made people afraid of it.
Maybe the answer to our plastic problem is quite simply... NOT TO HAVE ANY PLASTIC... I would be super curious to understand how much energy is used to 1) produce the plastic bottle, 2) transport the plastic bottle and then 3) store it safely in a landfill. I get the sense that we need to rethink plastic bottles entirely. If the EU is really committed to greening, its time we focus on the greenwashing by retailers and focus on long-term sustainable solutions.
I agree we should use less plastic but not by replacing it. It is often the most energy efficient and environmentally sustainable material. It is usually far more energy efficient than paper, cardboard, and organic fabric. Ugh exact that it does not degrade is a feature not a bug. Think of it as a carbon sink. We are investing millions in carbon capture methods when plastic is actually already captured carbon.
Your point about plastic using less energy than alternative packaging is great. And I wonder about the energy used and pollution caused when recycling plastic. But I wouldn’t call plastic carbon capture. The carbon used to make the plastic was captured millions of years ago and stored in the deep earth by drilling for oil and turning the oil onto plastic we are removing the carbon from the safe storage in the ground and expending energy and releasing carbon to do it. The plastic isn’t taking carbon out of the atmosphere but adding to it on production and use. It also creates by-product pollution while being made and pollutes if improperly disposed of which is very common.
The inevitable entropy of the process of manufacture fouls this sort of reasoning at some level. The missing consequence of plastic is not figuring out how to bury it nor assuming its stablity is a net plus. The reality is the slow mechanical breakdown of plastic for the last 75 years is permeating the foodchain. There is no easy way to keep it out. Just my opinion.
Does that matter? I am not aware of evidence that trace amounts of plastic in the food chain does any harm. I speak as a medical doctor/pathologist. We need to guard against irrational fears. They do terrible harm.
Here is an accesible video from a Doctor like yourself. This series of claims is well presented. Good data is already present in animal models. BPA contamination of the free protein foodchain is settled. Human concentrations and consequences are under study. BPA is an endocrine disrupter. That is the textbook definition of inflammation I would surmise. More study is the answer but from a work history at a service company that capitalized on the abrasive value of microbeads until pulling them from products, BPA in the foodchain seems a risky proposition. https://nutritionfacts.org/video/microplastic-contamination-and-seafood-safety/
Doctors are not necessarily toxicologists (scientific experts in the toxic properties of substances), so I would take this article with a grain of salt. The endocrine effects from BPA are less than what you would expect in soy products, just to put things in perspective. Any claim of low-dose effects in scientifically unfounded because not one of those studies has been replicated by a third-party laboratory that specializes in toxicological studies,
But MD Doctors who reference peer-reviewed scientific articles (3:53 of video onward) are a worthwhile consideration -- I am a fan of the scientific method and follow up study sounds great.
There are now advanced recycling techniques, collectively called molecular recycling, that break down polymers at the molecular level and convert them into a substance very similar to the original feedstock from which the plastic was made. This occurs with little to no degradation, so you can recycle many plastics over and over again.
Sounds like a great development in the abstract ala clean coal, long-term consolidated storage of spent nuclear fuel rods, fuel rod recycling. All of this sounds great but sort of like wish-cycling a dirty pizza box. I wish they could recycle that but in the real world such great new ideas are often aligned with lets keep making more of this stuff and move the goalposts. Carbon sequestration and nuclear fusion are great examples also.
The process is pyrolysis, which is used to make base petrochemicals via cracking. The same process can take mixed plastic waste and make a pyrolysis oil that is in the range of naphtha, which is a primary feedstock for ethylene, propylene, butylenes, etc. There are many, many articles on the particulars. It's already past the pilot phase and has moved to commercialization.
What are your thoughts then as an alternative to replacing it?
Do you have a sense of the energy through the cycle of plastic (end-to-end)? I would love to better understand that process?
For me, it doesn't intuitively make sense that plastic bottles are the most energy efficient when combining creation, transportation to the consumer, transportation from the consumer and then storing in the landfill. But it cold very well be that i don't have enough knowledge and hence I would love to better understand this whole lifecycle.
If you think we use a lot of energy to create plastic bottles wait until you find out how much energy is used to create glass bottles and how much more energy is used to transport glass bottles. If Asia and Africa would make landfills like the West then we wouldn't have all of this plastic in the ocean.
Super article. Thanks for sharing. I would really love to learn more and make more educated data driven decisions as a consumer. If anyone can recommend people to follow on Twitter, resources to subscribe to or research papers to read that an help in this regard, i would be so grateful.
Much of the world’s manufactured goods, including transportation and medical equipment could not be made without plastics. A world without plastic would be a steampunk nightmare.
For me, I am curious specifically about water drinking bottles? Is the drinking water throughout the world so bad (especially in the first world), where we need to purchase the water in a bottle?
My sensitivity is also that i see so much of this plastic wash up on the shore where i live (on a tiny island). When we swim as a family, i have to go and fish it out, especially after storms... its heartbreaking.. surely we can find viable alternatives to drinking water without having to bottle it in plastic? How bad is the water in Europe really that we only trust it when it is bottled in plastic?
One of the ironies of plastics is that Annex I countries, like the US and UK, get to subtract these nonfuel uses of fossil fuels from the greenhouse gas inventories that they submit every year to the UNFCCC. This doesn't seem like a very good incentive to clean up their acts.
I'll admit that the volumetric amount is less than I thought it would be. The bigger issue seems to be getting it out of the oceans in the first place.
This is a very useful analysis. Plastics are made from fossil fuels. Fossil fuels come from deep underground. It's not crazy to send them back underground when we're done with them.
But as the developing world industrializes, won't that mean more plastic? And more New York City-sized areas to store them ? One after another? At some point we'll have to come up with a better solution than using plastics for everything we currently use them for.
A more comprehensive strategy would be banning plastic where we don't need to use it, develop biodegradable alternatives that can be used for many applications where we currently use plastic, and then properly collect the plastic we still must use due to lack of proper alternatives and store it underground.
Bisphenol A (BPA) is not a plastic but is found in trace amounts in some plastic. There has been concern that food and liquids stored on plastic lined contained could lead to consumption of BPA.
Sorry I didn’t get back with a more complete resolve. Basically doctors and scientists are finding micro and nano particles of plastic in the ocean, snowfields on top of mountains, in the air at national parks and in our bloodstreams, lungs, and placentas of pregnant women. They have found it in the fish we eat and the air we breathe. We don’t know the complete consequences but do we need to know to suspect this is a terrible situation? Here’s an article as one example: https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/microplastics-human-body-know-dont-know-rcna23331. I find this frightening. I especially worry about my grandchildren.
Sure that is sort of right. Nanoscale of course is not a particle but merely millions or billions of said plastic strung together in some fashion. The nanoscale and\d even microscale only present challenges because filters are not built for items of such size. It is why WWTP process for bacteria and the like as they are of course much smaller than the filter. Reactivity is not the issue as they are basically inert. They are irritants in the same way that non reactive stuff irritates our lungs by virtue of their presence and geometry. While study will follow, their lifetime and the rate of change of accumulation is what drives researchers to pause. Step one was to remove some of them from cosmetics and body wash and the like. It wasn't reactionary as it was driven by cost impacts on society and did not even delve into the long-term health consequences as they are unknown.
Those are microplastic beads and I agree that they should have been removed as a precautionary measure. Once you get to nanoscale, however, that's getting down to the molecular size of the certain monomers.
A very well made point Margaret. My background is chemistry and engineering. We are chemical beings and everything has a toxicity at some threshold. Biochemistry and industry have jousted about these reasonable limits for a long time. I remember a portion of my work careers in nuclear energy and cleaning and hygiene. Both of them taught me we must conservatively set thresholds for what is reasonable. I remember as my children were growing up talking through the concept that even if you drink too much water, it can be your end!!! Whether trying to eat a teaspoon of cinnamon, cleaning with bleach and not carefully ensuring none gets on your fingers, accumulation of materials in the foodchain, etc., all of it has consequences. The question is always how much. My work experience informs me we have even convinced ourselves there is a certain amount of ionizing radiation that is okay!!! It was the post-analysis of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that aided the nuclear industry to establish "safe levels". While some on this thread might consider it reactionary, the truth is we do have some understanding of the impact of foreign bodies inside of us. Even then the industry that promoted silicone breast implants said "let's wait because the data is not in". When we compare the American and European approaches to regulation, we are a bit more laissez faire in the US. The World Wars and the emergence of pesticides led to the idea we should test chemicals before putting them in the consumers hands. A PERFECT example of this is bleach. Having the DIRECT experience, I know that the US "grandfathered" products that already existed.
Americans go into big box stores and buy liquid bleach and use it for all sorts of things. What do we KNOW about chlorinated products? They KILL LIVING tissue. Bleach is not sold so readily in most of Europe. They have concluded that washing things with agitation, higher temperature water and different surfactants is a better solution.
Wish I could upvote this comment! Very well stated. Spend ~20 years mitigating LWRs after 3-mile Island. B/C of the dearth of real-world experience the allowable guidelines were conservative. What is still not clear is difference between background and chronic. Going into containment 60 days and getting 1 mrem versus larger dose in single event. Kind of like a BAD sunburn vs. living in AZ with sunscreen.
Plastic regulation (lack thereof) is CLASSIC Tragedy of the Commons. Plastics are indeed remarkable for living. The instances that are truly transformational certainly exist. Our unwillingness to FORCE manufacturers to own the lifecycle of the products and bond/insure for the proper remediation through the lifecycle is the fundamental problem IMO
Why would a company that has no say whatsoever in how their product is used be responsible for some person's poor choices? I don't think any company advocates littering, just like they don't advocate any misuse of their products. Punish the people who make those poor choices. Perhaps a week picking up trash in public spaces would be a disincentive to littering.
The tragedy of the commons is not absurd nor been shown to be illusory. It is why when you get your tires swapped or your oil changed there is a disposal fee. Who and when the fee is applied is the matter of economics I think.
Lots of conflicting information from many viable sources. This one happens to be an organization within the NIH. Lots of bottle caps in a landfill. Whether in a landfill is not the biggest issue. Municipal water supplies lack screen sizes to deal with microplastics. You may be right that people should ignore lots of other conflicting sources. To me, that seems to imply the issue is far from settled.
This was a great mathematical analysis of "alll this plastic". Storing the spent material is a good exercise but I think misses the greater point. The long tail consequence of plastics in the first place already is and will continue to worsen as accumulation in the foodchain is the real consequence.
I’m shocked at the change in density of plastic by elevation. Looking at the Surface vs -45 meters rows, the tables suggests that plastic is more than 3x denser due to just 45 meters of elevation difference.
Air density doesn’t change nearly so quickly with elevation, so I have to assume the compression comes from the trash piled on top of it. But in that case the same density number doesn’t apply uniformly throughout the landfill.
The relevant article is behind a paywall. Can anyone shed some light on how that density is possible?
Curious if numbers are available on our current and projected rates of consumption of plastic globally and the land use that would require in the future. Also would be interested in taking into consideration feasible land to store said plastic, shipping emissions, and how globalization affects which countries are actually dealing with waste and their methods of dealing with it.
Another way to put it would be to say that all the plastics ever produced could fit into Lake Baikal in Russia, with enough room left over to leave the remaining volume of water the fifth largest in the world.
Thanks so very much for this, Hannah! I'm going to blog it, as an addition to my "Plastics are awesome and trash is fine, except food waste" chapter in https://www.losingmyreligions.net/
I wouldn’t say plastics are awesome. Some uses of them are highly important and have no alternative yet. Other uses are better than the alternatives at the moment. But creating plastics pollutes sometimes dangerously. Plastic improperly disposed of creates permanent also dangerous pollution. Plastics are light easily blow around and therefore will never be universally disposed of correctly. They can not decay-- they just get smaller and smaller till they become particles in our lungs and blood stream. Chemicals from ingested plastic in the bodies of fish are eaten by us and become part of our bodies. Young children have the chemicals from plastics in their bloodstreams. There are plastic residues in our water supplies. None of this is awesome.
Your comment Margaret hits it on the head! Our billion year old immune systems inherited from lower order animals has no answer for plastic. Hence, when our bodies cannot process it, it accumulates and causes inflammation. I've been in a "conversation" with deniers in the past. The reality is our immune system has commonality amongst all living things (witness CRISPR-CAS9) and everything hence accumulates with EXTREMELY narrow exceptions. We have lots of names for inflammation in our bodies and of the animals we eat. None of them are a good outcome.
I think you're forgetting that we also have filters in our bodies that detoxify substances at specific rates, which have been measured many times in controlled laboratory settings (the only reliable scientific approach). Most plastics pass cannot be absorbed into the bloodstream because they are inert. They are readily excreted just like many other materials that are not biologically active.
No, we have places for plastic waiting already. Landfill with plastic should be called land restoration when it is used to restore open cut mines to the original land contours. The volume of such mines hugely exceeds the production of waste in countries where such mines are common. These mines have railway lines to deliver the fill and are already undesirable places to live near so few peole do. Modern landfill with leachate barriers and control of airborne material are very unremarkable places these days. Groundwater is safe. Lomborg covered this issue on pages 206-210 of The Skeptical Environmentalist confirming the main idea of this excellent article.
Under pressure in a deep stacked landfill, is heat generated? Enough to melt the plastic and turn it into liquid chemicals? What would be the implications of that, if it is true? Possibilities for collection of liquids and extracting for use?
One thing you may want to consider for future articles is advanced recycling, which is different from the traditional recycling of shredding and melting. There are techniques that can break down the polymer chain at the molecular level into a substance that is very close to the original feedstock used to make the plastic in the first place. This is done with very little degradation, so that means we can recycle some plastics over and over again. Here is a primer from an investment firm that looks for recycling opportunities.
Could most plastics be recycled into use in road construction ,mixing with asphalt or cement for flexibility and support? Plastics came from crude oil refining as did asphalt.
Love this. The problem with plastic is when it does not go into landfill but ends up in waterways. Tragically, recycling often increases the risk of this as it is sold to dodgy people who just dump it instead of actually recycling it. Incinerating plastic is insane and should be banned.
What's wrong with incinerating plastic for heat/electricity generation, replacing some gas usage? Sure, it's probably not as clean or flexible as gas, but it's available.
Firstly the emissions are highly toxic, like emissions from burning coal and wood. Gas is actually MUCH much cleaner.
Secondly, it generates greenhouse gases.
The only argument in favour is that it eliminates the waste. However we don need to as putting in in landfills is safe and cheap.
I also think it is a serious mistake to burn wood for electricity. It actually released more CO2 than burning coal and the emissions are lethal. Domestic wood stoves are now the main source of harmful air pollution in many cities.
Plasma arc gasification with power generation is possible. It is expensive and although most organic compounds are broken down by the extreme heat some dioxins are still emitted.
https://www.nature.com/articles/444262a
As we get more excess oxygen from electrolysis, we should use some to oxy-incinerate it, make it into syn-gas by adding H2 and then into new products...
It would be interesting to have a quantitative comparison of the toxicity of gas versus waste. I agree, this is a big issue.
However, especially in Europe, I think it may be beneficial to avoid using coal and gas by using waste instead. We know that gas unfortunately comes at a great geopolitical cost (it wouldn't have to, but it does), so there can be an argument where the increased toxicity of waste is still worth the tradeoff.
I fully agree on wood not being a good source of electricity.
Of course Europe could crack for its own gas. It makes not sense to ban fracking and instead burn wood and waste. Nuclear power is of course the best option for reliable clean electricity. Decades of misinformation have made people afraid of it.
Maybe the answer to our plastic problem is quite simply... NOT TO HAVE ANY PLASTIC... I would be super curious to understand how much energy is used to 1) produce the plastic bottle, 2) transport the plastic bottle and then 3) store it safely in a landfill. I get the sense that we need to rethink plastic bottles entirely. If the EU is really committed to greening, its time we focus on the greenwashing by retailers and focus on long-term sustainable solutions.
I agree we should use less plastic but not by replacing it. It is often the most energy efficient and environmentally sustainable material. It is usually far more energy efficient than paper, cardboard, and organic fabric. Ugh exact that it does not degrade is a feature not a bug. Think of it as a carbon sink. We are investing millions in carbon capture methods when plastic is actually already captured carbon.
Your point about plastic using less energy than alternative packaging is great. And I wonder about the energy used and pollution caused when recycling plastic. But I wouldn’t call plastic carbon capture. The carbon used to make the plastic was captured millions of years ago and stored in the deep earth by drilling for oil and turning the oil onto plastic we are removing the carbon from the safe storage in the ground and expending energy and releasing carbon to do it. The plastic isn’t taking carbon out of the atmosphere but adding to it on production and use. It also creates by-product pollution while being made and pollutes if improperly disposed of which is very common.
The inevitable entropy of the process of manufacture fouls this sort of reasoning at some level. The missing consequence of plastic is not figuring out how to bury it nor assuming its stablity is a net plus. The reality is the slow mechanical breakdown of plastic for the last 75 years is permeating the foodchain. There is no easy way to keep it out. Just my opinion.
Does that matter? I am not aware of evidence that trace amounts of plastic in the food chain does any harm. I speak as a medical doctor/pathologist. We need to guard against irrational fears. They do terrible harm.
Here is an accesible video from a Doctor like yourself. This series of claims is well presented. Good data is already present in animal models. BPA contamination of the free protein foodchain is settled. Human concentrations and consequences are under study. BPA is an endocrine disrupter. That is the textbook definition of inflammation I would surmise. More study is the answer but from a work history at a service company that capitalized on the abrasive value of microbeads until pulling them from products, BPA in the foodchain seems a risky proposition. https://nutritionfacts.org/video/microplastic-contamination-and-seafood-safety/
Doctors are not necessarily toxicologists (scientific experts in the toxic properties of substances), so I would take this article with a grain of salt. The endocrine effects from BPA are less than what you would expect in soy products, just to put things in perspective. Any claim of low-dose effects in scientifically unfounded because not one of those studies has been replicated by a third-party laboratory that specializes in toxicological studies,
But MD Doctors who reference peer-reviewed scientific articles (3:53 of video onward) are a worthwhile consideration -- I am a fan of the scientific method and follow up study sounds great.
There are now advanced recycling techniques, collectively called molecular recycling, that break down polymers at the molecular level and convert them into a substance very similar to the original feedstock from which the plastic was made. This occurs with little to no degradation, so you can recycle many plastics over and over again.
Sounds like a great development in the abstract ala clean coal, long-term consolidated storage of spent nuclear fuel rods, fuel rod recycling. All of this sounds great but sort of like wish-cycling a dirty pizza box. I wish they could recycle that but in the real world such great new ideas are often aligned with lets keep making more of this stuff and move the goalposts. Carbon sequestration and nuclear fusion are great examples also.
The process is pyrolysis, which is used to make base petrochemicals via cracking. The same process can take mixed plastic waste and make a pyrolysis oil that is in the range of naphtha, which is a primary feedstock for ethylene, propylene, butylenes, etc. There are many, many articles on the particulars. It's already past the pilot phase and has moved to commercialization.
You raise such valid and interesting points.
What are your thoughts then as an alternative to replacing it?
Do you have a sense of the energy through the cycle of plastic (end-to-end)? I would love to better understand that process?
For me, it doesn't intuitively make sense that plastic bottles are the most energy efficient when combining creation, transportation to the consumer, transportation from the consumer and then storing in the landfill. But it cold very well be that i don't have enough knowledge and hence I would love to better understand this whole lifecycle.
If you think we use a lot of energy to create plastic bottles wait until you find out how much energy is used to create glass bottles and how much more energy is used to transport glass bottles. If Asia and Africa would make landfills like the West then we wouldn't have all of this plastic in the ocean.
The good news is there are quite a few analyses available that compare plastics to other materials. Here's one from the produce industry.
https://theproducenews.com/headlines/industry-viewpoint-life-cycle-analysis-plastic-vs-paper
Super article. Thanks for sharing. I would really love to learn more and make more educated data driven decisions as a consumer. If anyone can recommend people to follow on Twitter, resources to subscribe to or research papers to read that an help in this regard, i would be so grateful.
Much of the world’s manufactured goods, including transportation and medical equipment could not be made without plastics. A world without plastic would be a steampunk nightmare.
Very valid point.
For me, I am curious specifically about water drinking bottles? Is the drinking water throughout the world so bad (especially in the first world), where we need to purchase the water in a bottle?
My sensitivity is also that i see so much of this plastic wash up on the shore where i live (on a tiny island). When we swim as a family, i have to go and fish it out, especially after storms... its heartbreaking.. surely we can find viable alternatives to drinking water without having to bottle it in plastic? How bad is the water in Europe really that we only trust it when it is bottled in plastic?
Are decommissioned mines an option? The land has already been gutted and in a roundabout way is putting back what was taken out.
Dibs on “we have to close the mine shaft gap!”
😂
One of the ironies of plastics is that Annex I countries, like the US and UK, get to subtract these nonfuel uses of fossil fuels from the greenhouse gas inventories that they submit every year to the UNFCCC. This doesn't seem like a very good incentive to clean up their acts.
I'll admit that the volumetric amount is less than I thought it would be. The bigger issue seems to be getting it out of the oceans in the first place.
This is a very useful analysis. Plastics are made from fossil fuels. Fossil fuels come from deep underground. It's not crazy to send them back underground when we're done with them.
But as the developing world industrializes, won't that mean more plastic? And more New York City-sized areas to store them ? One after another? At some point we'll have to come up with a better solution than using plastics for everything we currently use them for.
A more comprehensive strategy would be banning plastic where we don't need to use it, develop biodegradable alternatives that can be used for many applications where we currently use plastic, and then properly collect the plastic we still must use due to lack of proper alternatives and store it underground.
Bisphenol A (BPA) is not a plastic but is found in trace amounts in some plastic. There has been concern that food and liquids stored on plastic lined contained could lead to consumption of BPA.
This is not an issue with plastic in landfill.
https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/topics/topic/bisphenol
Sorry I didn’t get back with a more complete resolve. Basically doctors and scientists are finding micro and nano particles of plastic in the ocean, snowfields on top of mountains, in the air at national parks and in our bloodstreams, lungs, and placentas of pregnant women. They have found it in the fish we eat and the air we breathe. We don’t know the complete consequences but do we need to know to suspect this is a terrible situation? Here’s an article as one example: https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/microplastics-human-body-know-dont-know-rcna23331. I find this frightening. I especially worry about my grandchildren.
Since plastics are long chains of individual units (called monomers), wouldn't a particle at the nanoscale just be a monomer or something close?
Sure that is sort of right. Nanoscale of course is not a particle but merely millions or billions of said plastic strung together in some fashion. The nanoscale and\d even microscale only present challenges because filters are not built for items of such size. It is why WWTP process for bacteria and the like as they are of course much smaller than the filter. Reactivity is not the issue as they are basically inert. They are irritants in the same way that non reactive stuff irritates our lungs by virtue of their presence and geometry. While study will follow, their lifetime and the rate of change of accumulation is what drives researchers to pause. Step one was to remove some of them from cosmetics and body wash and the like. It wasn't reactionary as it was driven by cost impacts on society and did not even delve into the long-term health consequences as they are unknown.
Those are microplastic beads and I agree that they should have been removed as a precautionary measure. Once you get to nanoscale, however, that's getting down to the molecular size of the certain monomers.
A very well made point Margaret. My background is chemistry and engineering. We are chemical beings and everything has a toxicity at some threshold. Biochemistry and industry have jousted about these reasonable limits for a long time. I remember a portion of my work careers in nuclear energy and cleaning and hygiene. Both of them taught me we must conservatively set thresholds for what is reasonable. I remember as my children were growing up talking through the concept that even if you drink too much water, it can be your end!!! Whether trying to eat a teaspoon of cinnamon, cleaning with bleach and not carefully ensuring none gets on your fingers, accumulation of materials in the foodchain, etc., all of it has consequences. The question is always how much. My work experience informs me we have even convinced ourselves there is a certain amount of ionizing radiation that is okay!!! It was the post-analysis of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that aided the nuclear industry to establish "safe levels". While some on this thread might consider it reactionary, the truth is we do have some understanding of the impact of foreign bodies inside of us. Even then the industry that promoted silicone breast implants said "let's wait because the data is not in". When we compare the American and European approaches to regulation, we are a bit more laissez faire in the US. The World Wars and the emergence of pesticides led to the idea we should test chemicals before putting them in the consumers hands. A PERFECT example of this is bleach. Having the DIRECT experience, I know that the US "grandfathered" products that already existed.
Americans go into big box stores and buy liquid bleach and use it for all sorts of things. What do we KNOW about chlorinated products? They KILL LIVING tissue. Bleach is not sold so readily in most of Europe. They have concluded that washing things with agitation, higher temperature water and different surfactants is a better solution.
We are constantly exposed to background ionizing radiation, so some of it is obviously ok.
Arguably, regulations for monitoring radiation exposure is too conservative in the nuclear industry.
Arguably, regulations for plastic compounds have been too loose (but are improving).
Modern civilization as we know it would be impossible without plastics.
Wish I could upvote this comment! Very well stated. Spend ~20 years mitigating LWRs after 3-mile Island. B/C of the dearth of real-world experience the allowable guidelines were conservative. What is still not clear is difference between background and chronic. Going into containment 60 days and getting 1 mrem versus larger dose in single event. Kind of like a BAD sunburn vs. living in AZ with sunscreen.
Plastic regulation (lack thereof) is CLASSIC Tragedy of the Commons. Plastics are indeed remarkable for living. The instances that are truly transformational certainly exist. Our unwillingness to FORCE manufacturers to own the lifecycle of the products and bond/insure for the proper remediation through the lifecycle is the fundamental problem IMO
Why would a company that has no say whatsoever in how their product is used be responsible for some person's poor choices? I don't think any company advocates littering, just like they don't advocate any misuse of their products. Punish the people who make those poor choices. Perhaps a week picking up trash in public spaces would be a disincentive to littering.
The tragedy of the commons is not absurd nor been shown to be illusory. It is why when you get your tires swapped or your oil changed there is a disposal fee. Who and when the fee is applied is the matter of economics I think.
The problem isn’t burying the plastic. It’s producing it.
Lots of conflicting information from many viable sources. This one happens to be an organization within the NIH. Lots of bottle caps in a landfill. Whether in a landfill is not the biggest issue. Municipal water supplies lack screen sizes to deal with microplastics. You may be right that people should ignore lots of other conflicting sources. To me, that seems to imply the issue is far from settled.
https://www.niehs.nih.gov/health/topics/agents/sya-bpa/index.cfm
https://www.vdh.virginia.gov/environmental-health/public-health-toxicology/bisphenol-a/#:~:text=Food%20and%20beverages%20are%20the,storage%20containers%2C%20and%20water%20bottles.
This was a great mathematical analysis of "alll this plastic". Storing the spent material is a good exercise but I think misses the greater point. The long tail consequence of plastics in the first place already is and will continue to worsen as accumulation in the foodchain is the real consequence.
I’m shocked at the change in density of plastic by elevation. Looking at the Surface vs -45 meters rows, the tables suggests that plastic is more than 3x denser due to just 45 meters of elevation difference.
Air density doesn’t change nearly so quickly with elevation, so I have to assume the compression comes from the trash piled on top of it. But in that case the same density number doesn’t apply uniformly throughout the landfill.
The relevant article is behind a paywall. Can anyone shed some light on how that density is possible?
Curious if numbers are available on our current and projected rates of consumption of plastic globally and the land use that would require in the future. Also would be interested in taking into consideration feasible land to store said plastic, shipping emissions, and how globalization affects which countries are actually dealing with waste and their methods of dealing with it.
Another way to put it would be to say that all the plastics ever produced could fit into Lake Baikal in Russia, with enough room left over to leave the remaining volume of water the fifth largest in the world.
Thanks so very much for this, Hannah! I'm going to blog it, as an addition to my "Plastics are awesome and trash is fine, except food waste" chapter in https://www.losingmyreligions.net/
I wouldn’t say plastics are awesome. Some uses of them are highly important and have no alternative yet. Other uses are better than the alternatives at the moment. But creating plastics pollutes sometimes dangerously. Plastic improperly disposed of creates permanent also dangerous pollution. Plastics are light easily blow around and therefore will never be universally disposed of correctly. They can not decay-- they just get smaller and smaller till they become particles in our lungs and blood stream. Chemicals from ingested plastic in the bodies of fish are eaten by us and become part of our bodies. Young children have the chemicals from plastics in their bloodstreams. There are plastic residues in our water supplies. None of this is awesome.
Your comment Margaret hits it on the head! Our billion year old immune systems inherited from lower order animals has no answer for plastic. Hence, when our bodies cannot process it, it accumulates and causes inflammation. I've been in a "conversation" with deniers in the past. The reality is our immune system has commonality amongst all living things (witness CRISPR-CAS9) and everything hence accumulates with EXTREMELY narrow exceptions. We have lots of names for inflammation in our bodies and of the animals we eat. None of them are a good outcome.
I think you're forgetting that we also have filters in our bodies that detoxify substances at specific rates, which have been measured many times in controlled laboratory settings (the only reliable scientific approach). Most plastics pass cannot be absorbed into the bloodstream because they are inert. They are readily excreted just like many other materials that are not biologically active.
No, we have places for plastic waiting already. Landfill with plastic should be called land restoration when it is used to restore open cut mines to the original land contours. The volume of such mines hugely exceeds the production of waste in countries where such mines are common. These mines have railway lines to deliver the fill and are already undesirable places to live near so few peole do. Modern landfill with leachate barriers and control of airborne material are very unremarkable places these days. Groundwater is safe. Lomborg covered this issue on pages 206-210 of The Skeptical Environmentalist confirming the main idea of this excellent article.
Why don't we use it as fuel by burning it?
Under pressure in a deep stacked landfill, is heat generated? Enough to melt the plastic and turn it into liquid chemicals? What would be the implications of that, if it is true? Possibilities for collection of liquids and extracting for use?
One thing you may want to consider for future articles is advanced recycling, which is different from the traditional recycling of shredding and melting. There are techniques that can break down the polymer chain at the molecular level into a substance that is very close to the original feedstock used to make the plastic in the first place. This is done with very little degradation, so that means we can recycle some plastics over and over again. Here is a primer from an investment firm that looks for recycling opportunities.
https://www.closedlooppartners.com/advanced-recycling/
Could most plastics be recycled into use in road construction ,mixing with asphalt or cement for flexibility and support? Plastics came from crude oil refining as did asphalt.
Dow has done work in this area and built a road to demonstrate the concept.