5 Gyres - Understanding Plastic Pollution Through Exploration, Education, and Action

(photo courtesy of Chelsea Rochman, Tijuana River Valley)

I've been told that Edward Abbey had a bumper sticker on his 60s era Cadillac that read, 'Burn The Shit Up.' I love the sentiment for its irony. It's pretty cynical, stating that there is little point in conservation efforts because humans, historically, tend to only act when forced to, and that no matter what happens we will exhaust a given resource before we'll really switch to something sustainable.  

New ideas and technologies are often met with Galileo-esque skepticism, are lobbied against because bigger players want to maintain market control, and promising solutions dangle on the verge of capital investment big enough to make them a player.  But the plastic spigot doesn't shut off.  Not from the production to the ocean. So it's hard for me to believe that I'm doing anything 'really' good for the earth by throwing a plastic piece of plastic in my recycle bin. In the US, consumption of single-use plastics far outpaces even the best advances in recycling. So, we're not doing better, we're doing worse and recycling is fueling the guilt-free over consumption diet of single-use plastics. The laws of nature are simple, matter is neither gained nor destroyed and you can only make more plastic out of plastic-- it doesn't matter if it's decking material or fleece jackets, it's still plastic. That's it. That's the big fat problem. 

I spoke with Mark Daniels at Hilex Poly about a month ago. He'd Googled me and 5 Gyres, but pretended he didn't know who I was for awhile. Fair enough, I've been a pretty outspoken proponent of bag bans. Mark stated in our conversation that his company recycles 1/50th of the plastic bags we as a nation consume annually. We agreed that this rate was 100 billion and that Hilex recycled 2 billion of that. Daniels has had this conversation before. He rattles talking point facts in conversation that are redoubled on his site. He talks about plastic bags being reused often by consumers which somehow, for reasons I can't understand, makes him believe that reusing a plastic bag somehow lessons its environmental impact after its used a second time. Here's the problem: reuse of plastic bags actually makes us DEPENDENT on them-- using them for dog poop or trash can liners or whatever means that once used, you need more and more and more of them for dog poop and trash can-liners.  

Daniels told me personal narratives of beaches he cherishes. He used phrases like 'cradle to cradle' when describing his company's ethic. We went in circles, point/counterpoint into the absurd. The real issue is this: you can't make a bag out of a bag. At present, available technology only allows for 30% post consumer high density polyethylene (HDPE) to be added to the next generation of bag because the recycling process weakens polymer chains needed for a new bag's structural integrity. This translates to 70% virgin material being added to the next generation of bags. Which means every time you recycle one bag, you net 3.3 new bags. And every time you recycle 3.3 bags, you will then net 10.  And so on and so on to infinity. 

This is precisely why industry favors recycling as THE solution. Now, you can make other stuff out of recycled HDPE as well, like deck chairs and wallets and whatever else. Making single-use plastic into durable goods doesn't mean you're eliminating plastic. But after about forty years in the sun UV light will start making that chair brittle. And how long does a wallet last? So then what? Where does it go? Answer: the trash, the street, the river, the ocean. If you metrically increase the sum total of plastic in the world, the sum total of plastic escaping the waste stream and ending up in the environment will go up, as a matter of mathematical law. What's my evidence? Well, the problem is getting worse. And it's worse today than it was yesterday. Daniels wasn't pleased with my pushiness, which is fine, because I'm not pleased that he is suing reusable bag makers, and fighting any bag ban policy everywhere and spending lots of money to do it. Half the time during our conversation I felt like he was simply constructing elaborate but flawed argument structures to convince himself of what he was saying. 

Finally, I asked him, "Mark, is it a fair statement that the product of recycling plastic is more plastic in the world, not less?" His answer, "Yes."  So there you have it- does it get any simpler than that? Recycling isn't doing anything but altering the process by how we manufacture more plastic and creating secondary markets to do so. 

The marketing campaign repeats the same facts from Daniels and the website. He champions that it's made mostly of natural gas as opposed to raw crude. I'm sorry, but when did natural gas become a renewable resource? And another-- they put up youtube videos touting this fact "Plastic Bags Are 100% Recycleable"

Fair enough, but he darn well knows that only 1 in 50 ARE recycled. This is intentionally misleading. And he's been trained to know the nuance. The media, for its part, is guilty of perpetuating the recycling myth too. They never truly analyze the waste stream--  they don't look at what happens to your plastic stuff after you throw it in your recycling box.  Here's what's at issue: we have an endless supply of plastic garbage because we consume so incredibly much of it. We've consumed more plastic in this century than the entire century previous already. It's only 2011. So that means that the demand for waste plastic and recycled feedstock will always be vastly lower than the supply. You don't need a degree in economics to understand that this makes waste plastic, as a commodity, worthless.

Let's look at Hilex Poly. They're owned by a parent company that manufactures virgin plastic stuff. They also aren't a public corporation, so I can't get access to their profit and loss statements but I know that they were in bankruptcy for quite awhile. They seem to have an endless supply of lobby and marketing dollars to fight anti-single use plastic legislation. Business must be booming-- either that, or they're just a giant PR front pushing a feel good solution that isn't doing anything but passing the buck to the taxpayer to cleanup, encouraging more consumption and making the next generation deal with algorithmically increasing plastic garbage on beaches and waterways.  I don't want to sound harsh, but if they're in the business of producing plastic, their goal is to produce more of it. Not less. That's business.

They are exacerbating the problem with a smiley face. We've reached a tipping point with our world's oceans where mitigation as anything but a short term strategy should be laughed out of a room. We need to stop the crap going in. Yesterday. Or the day before that.  As an exercise: start by asking whomever you give your bags to to recycle where they end up. And then ask the next chain of custody where they go. And then the next. Determine then for yourself, if you believe recycling works. 

I looked at one particular case in response to an Op-Ed in The Statesman Journal. The bags went to a transfer station, and then in this case, they went to a company called AgriPlas who is attempting to turn plastic into fuel but the market forces governing their model are cost prohibitive. They said, "Every bit of polyethylene we've collected over the past two years is still here, there are very few domestic markets for plastic wraps, bags and films. Sometimes China takes it." The China factor is interesting. China takes it because we import more than we export as a country. This means boats are empty going home so it's easy to take it. China is not sending empty ships to America, buying plastic, and taking it home. Plastic is concentrated fuel and once they get it home they can burn it for fuel with no environmental constraints on emissions. 

So what DO WE DO?  

Well, for one, we need to incentivize plastic or make it a valuable material for its fuel source and not worthless crap. Bottle bills are a great start for PET, but industry fights these tooth and nail too. But again, so what if you're making more plastic stuff out of using recycled PET as feedstock? How is this helping to reduce the amount of plastic in the world? It's not. So what are you actually accomplishing by recycling other than creating more industry infrastructure to make more plastic? By recycling, from an economic vantage, we're making the industry more economically powerful to lobby against environmental legislation designed to address it.    

DO I think we should just throw it in a landfill? Well, kind of.  Sometimes I do. Hear me out. Throwing plastic away would accelerate landfills filling and closing.  That would accelerate all the bad stuff that happens to water tables below landfills.  That would make the stuff pile up so drastically fast we'd have no choice as a society but to do something meaningful about it.  Burn the shit up, as Abbey's bumper sticker read.  But here's what I think, really.  First, get aware of your consumption. Count the plastic objects you interact with daily.  Figure out where you can eliminate them.  Start seeing it everywhere where it lurks, in your home, on the street, everywhere. And then, yes, let's burn the rest of the shit up responsibly, especially if we're going to keep making it, which we are-- as Abbey predicts. See, I'm not saying we should stop making plastic entirely, it's a wonderful material for some applications, but we need to understand the true implications for the world where it ends up.

We have to take the resources spent on building recycling infrastructure and put them into decentralized plasma incineration technologies that pay for plastic feed and burn garbage at such a high heat, the resulting harmful emissions don't form as a byproduct. We need to destroy it, turn it back to inert elements. This technology already exists. It's used on military bases and cruise ships. The byproduct of burning plastic in this way is electricity and inert slag. Check out the company in Toronto, Pyrogenesis. We've been there, we believe this is a viable solution. But we'd need a paradigm shift in attitude towards waste infrastructure to make this work. 

Polymers are all over the place. You're a polymer. You can make polymers out of things other than oil or sorry, natural gas. But if industry is going to shift to start making them plant based, which they are, because fossil fuels are becoming increasingly more expensive, let's deliver that plastic back to their doorstep for fuel. Because making it out of plants doesn't solve the problem of it's longevity in the environment. Now, there is one good thing about recycling that should give us some hope. I like it's sociological import: it shows that widescale behavior change with regard to attitudes towards waste can happen. But that's where you and I come in. We're the dogs who have to learn new tricks if our puppies are going to survive. 

So what happens when you challenge industry on their solution? They balk at meaningful recycling thresholds. This is what happened to my home state of Oregon's bag policy legislation. I watched a statewide bag ban fail in Oregon because lawmakers were convinced they shouldn't act because lobbyists for the industry kept touting recycling as a solution. So a couple of republican senators attempted to address this in the bill (OR SB-536) itself at the 11th hour. The so called -18 amendments championed by Vic Gilliam (R) called for recycling thresholds to increase 20% per year up to 80% (which in school terms, is still a B-) or otherwise a ban goes into effect.  Anna Richter Taylor, a spokesperson for Hilex Poly said these thresholds were, and I quote,"unrealistic." So, basically what is industry admitting? Answer: that recycling isn't the solution. And when asked WHAT IS a meaningful threshold by the reporter, Richter was tight lipped, saying, "We're not going to negotiate through the media." Why doesn't she just say what she means? "Meaningful thresholds for recycling are what I DAMN WELL SAY THEY ARE AND I'M GOING TO OUTSPEND YOU TO HAVE IT MY WAY AND IF YOU CHALLENGE ME I'M TAKING MY PLASTIC BALL AND GOING HOME." 

When I was a kid, my dad used to say, 'You'd argue with a sign post and take the wrong way home." This is how I feel the industry argues. If public policy limits their ability to conduct business anyway they say fit, they'll pull from a very effective playbook to defeat anything proposed. Susan Freinkel, author of Plastic: A Toxic Love Story summed up their tactics very well on her blog. But what about the ACC (American Chemistry Council) funding gyre expeditions and marine debris conferences? Isn't that a sign of goodwill?  Unfortunately, it's more like a tactic to frame the debate. As reporter Ashley Ahearn who produced a story for a local NPR affiliate on plastic said in response to an interview with Steve Russell, Vice President of The American Chemistry Council about their funding for the plastic research he touted was, "What the general public needs to understand about the prevalence of plastics in the ocean is more research examining the biological impact of what happens when plastics make their way into the ecosystem." In short what she's saying is that we already know it's out there. 5 Gyres has shown that it's in every subtropical oceanic gyre now. Why doesn't the ACC fund independent research institutions on how it's killing us? Or how plastic is absorbing runoff pollutants, concentrating it, being consumed by fish, and bioaccumulating and magnifying up the food chain to your spicy tuna roll? Bad for biz, isn't it?

The most cynical tactic I've seen is this: industry hammers on a plastic policy with a plastic bag ban with a 5 cent paper bag fee attached saying that it's a tax. Well, in Oregon, the definition of a tax is very specific and Politifact called out Mark Daniels and Anna Richter Taylor for calling it a tax. They use the word 'tax' to galvanize the anti-tax base even though the 5 cent deposit on paper doesn't go into state coffers. Strategically, the goal is to politically defeat it on tax grounds that have nothing to do with the environment and to pressure lawmakers to drop the 5 cent deposit so they can then later challenge the constitutionality of such a policy in the courts. The grounds? Typically, it's that its unfair to single out plastic as an environmental problem and not paper. The irony? That's what the bill they lobbied against is precisely trying to address! It's ugly, it's complex and it works because we're not paying enough attention to their tactics. The cherry on top? Suing reusable bag manufacturers to boot! Egads! 

Putting all this together, how can a citizen feel anything but hoodwinked by an industry hell bent on polluting the world?  Contributing to bioaccumulated toxins in your body that they are responsible for producing?  How is recycling going to fix this? I'm okay with taking small steps, but they have to be in the right direction.