"T'ain't What they Do (It's the Way That You Dispose of them)".......
This very poor hark back to the words of the band, Bananarama, from the 1980’s introduces us to the opportunity as well as the problem with plastics. Plastics generally get a bad press - but happily not in a recent article in the Financial Times by Sam Knight on 26/4/08. I’ve looked closely at what he said, which was very informative indeed, and taken a little of it for use in this post.
Plastics are designed to be disposable....
If you buy something expensive you generally expect it to endure and work for a long time - it consequently is rarely made of plastics. If a plastic item goes wrong you either decide to ‘make do and mend’ or eventually replace it. Objects made from plastics are generally cheaper and will deteriorate over time (this is called ‘ageing’), but they normally do outlast the use we put them to. They are then generally disposed of - herein lies the difficulty. We are hopeless at coping with plastic waste. We have not applied anything like the same creativity we did in the design, to what we should do with them once they’re ready to be thrown away.
Glass isn’t designed to be disposable, but it is.....
The position is made even more nonsensical by our predilection for glass (see post 8). Glass is extremely heavy and requires a lot of energy to move it around the globe. In the UK plastics represent 53% of the packaging we use, but only 20% of the weight of packaging we use, transport and dispose of. Glass, on the other hand, represents 10% of the packaging we use but, at 20% of the weight, is equally burdensome on transport and disposal. Simplistically glass is five times less efficient, gram for gram, than plastics as a packaging material. Australian winemakers - the real innovators in the wine business - have worked this one out, and are now using PET bottles to export wine to the UK, as it's more economical in energy terms.
In praise of plastics again....
In the FT article the Packaging Foundation claim that ‘modern life’, for better or worse, is only possible because of the highly creative design and use of plastics - they describe it as the ‘forgotten infrastructure’. Some interesting illustrations of its wider effect are:
- Plastics packaging has enabled us to source and distribute foods from many parts of the world and keep it in good condition, thus defying the local seasons and giving enormous variety to our diet. So for example, thanks to laminated plastics packaging, fruit juice from Brazil can be kept palatable for nine months in a Tetrapak. It also enables us to buy pre-prepared meals which can be made presentable and edible in just a few minutes.
- In India, which uses much less packaging, 50% of the food in the supply chain is lost, compared to the UK’s complex supply chains which lose only 3%. All this good food going to waste is bad enough but the energy to distribute it needlessly must also be put into the emissions equation.
- The film wrapped cucumber is taken as an icon of needless packaging. The Cucumber Growers Association argue that the film, weighing in at 1.5g per item, doubles the shelf life to two weeks, and makes the product more durable in transit. So for a very small investment in plastics film we reduce waste and all its additional associated disposal and distribution costs.
Sensible disposal of plastics....
Given then that we have invented a brilliant way of reducing waste throughout the pre-sale supply chain, but acknowledging that it does cause a challenge for us to dispose of, let’s look at this from first principles. The disposal problem could be very simple if we return to the waste hierarchy:
Reduce - yes, that is a light possibility, although plastics manufacture only uses 2% of the crude oil produced. If we are talking about plastics packaging, there are good reasons for continuing to use it.
Reuse - there is little we can do to reuse plastics because of their tendency to deteriorate. Who wants a yellowing, slightly cracked PC monitor?
Recycle - this is generally very difficult because there are so many different types of plastic which are difficult to differentiate and then separate, or are tightly juxtaposed in laminates. There are over 20 different types with very specific properties. When mixed up they lose their specific functionality.
Energy recovery - has definite possibilities. At high temperatures many plastics will burn reasonably cleanly but they will produce CO2, from the carbon in them. As that carbon is derived from crude oil extracted from the subterranean sphere (see post 5), it is adding to the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere and thereby contributing to climate change.
Landfill - or disposal at sea could look like the most likely option. When this occurs, there is very little nature can do with plastics, unlike vegetable waste, for example. It just remains as unbiodegradeable rubbish - unsightly and offensive on the eye. In the sea it breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces as part of its natural ageing process and due to the violent movement of the sea’s surface. Eventually it looks like plankton and is ingested by marine life, where it has no nutritional value. The presence of non-biodegradable plastics in the sea has also caused quite a stir in environmental circles with the reporting of large quantities of plastics ending up in the Sub Polar North Pacific Gyre - a natural marine vortex. Not only is this unsightly and disrespectful to other creatures in the biosphere it is also a significant waste of an opportunity. These plastics have plenty of energy and chemical structure left in them - it is simply a matter of using these productively without producing greenhouse gases. We haven’t found a viable way of doing that yet.
‘Well-fill’....
This landfill conundrum is still an opportunity. Think of landfill as ‘well-fill’, or ‘mine-fill’. Let us fluidise or compress this stuff and put it away, fully acknowledged and recorded, deep down beyond any degradation agents such as light or microbes, or dissemination forces such as the wind or water. Here it can remain, immobile and inert, until perhaps 30 years when we have had time to invent the technology to make prudent use of its energy and chemical structure. When the fossil fuels begin to run out we will have a store of low grade hydrocarbon material ready to be pumped up again. There is a great symmetry to it: we extract hydrocarbon, turn it into something useful which does its job, and then return the hydrocarbon whence it came, for the next generation if they choose to use it.
Making it happen....
Assuming that we have got the design right for the post sale supply chain and then built it, we will need to get those people who are earnestly recycling in one way to do so in another. This is not easy but is an inevitable price for making an ill considered false start. But let’s face up to it, agree on the mistake and get on with it straightforwardly. There is no time to lose. The plastics wine bottle is a good example, like the cucumber, of the received wisdom being wrong. As a result populist governments enact legislation which is misguided and influence populations and major corporations like supermarkets to behave in totally counter-productive ways - this is perverse in the extreme, and extremely serious as it is leading well-meaning collective human effort in the wrong direction. The FT quotes one of the Prime Minister’s sustainability commissioners, Tim Lang, as describing the situation as a ‘mess’.
Plastics, particularly in packaging are thought of as an environmental threat - the iconic disposable carrier bag - typifies this:
- What for one person is a non-biodegradable blight on the landscape, for which legislation on their issue by supermarkets is being considered,
- For another, it is a brilliant bit of design arriving at a extremely low cost way to help customers get their purchases home in one piece and avoid waste from damage, and
- For another, like me, it is a piece of material with fossil fuel carbon sequestered away within it, which could be taken out of the biosphere.
The earlier ‘minefill’ suggestion satisfies all three points of view. Perhaps if this were viable, then the post sale supply chain needs designing with similar ingenuity as the pre-sale one. Finally people need to understand it and ‘buy into’ it, as they have done, for other domestic and commercial waste streams.
Addressing a nagging doubt....
In their praise of plastics, the FT quoted the modern lifestyle. Plastics are serving our desire for the modern lifestyle admirably and if we learn to dispose of them sensibly, what’s the problem? However, what about this modern lifestyle that we feel impelled to adopt - is it providing satisfaction and fulfilment? If we honestly ask the following questions of ourselves, what does it reveal?
- Are we really finding happiness living this modern style of life?
- Does happiness increase with increasing consumption?
- If so, if we push even harder will it get better?
- Does it matter if we deprive others elsewhere in our quest for greater happiness?
- What do others think of our enormous propensity to consume?
Amongst the people of around my age (53), I detect quite a bit of ambiguity and enquiry. On the one hand, as we have advanced in age, our careers may have made us richer, we probably possess more than our parents and can, for example, afford several foreign holidays, but on the other hand we still hark back to a less complicated, slower life, in our childhood. I, for one, am coming to see climate change as an alert, a symptom of a profound problem about ourselves. We seem not to see the big picture - where this might all rather end up. Perhaps it’s not plastics, nor cheap air travel, nor my next mobile phone that’s the actual problem, but it’s our unthinking hunger for them which is going unbridled.
As in many of these posts, when you step far enough back to see the big picture, the view changes and the solutions can seem more profound and lasting. My next post will consider some excellent and optimistic thinking from Adair Turner in the book, ‘Do Good Lives Have to Cost the Earth?’.
