(plas)Ticked Off

     Finally, this overdue post on plastics arrives.  I had started writing it months ago but other things came up: reflections, politics, cleaning up, laziness.  All that, and I think I must add the almost-depressing state of what is happening in our world and how much we seem to be in denial.  Not only in the wars and the income inequality, but in the sheer number of us and our urge to be somewhere,  whether for fun or work.  And so we drive, or fly, or cruise, and we check our workstations or laptops or phones, and we want information, and quickly.  And now AI.  All of that means power, and water, and often war, because we're running out of what we have.  So we burn all sorts of junk to make that power --from coal to nuclear to plastics (more petroleum)-- and we wonder why or how the planet could be re-entering a phase of changing climate...surely it isn't us, because we're doing our best: driving electric cars and scooters and bikes, putting solar panels on our homes, and admiring the wind farms spinning away on some distant farmland.  Surely that's enough, isn't it?  Let's just ask the chatbot...

     If all of that sounds a bit sour, or dour, or frustrating, well it is.  In all likelihood, you may be feeling similar things, reaching a point of ignoring it all by asking yourself, well what can I really do about it?  I do my part: I recycle, I try to drive less, I pay my utilities.  What about everyone else?  Oh wait a minute, the new television has arrived so I'll get back to you.  I bring a small bit of this up because the issues of reducing or avoiding plastics, even those microplastics entering our bodies because we're growing steam-in-the-bag lazy, is feeling a bit hopeless for me.  I don't say that lightly because I'm not one to give up on solving a problem; but let's face it, plastics are here to stay, even if that means that plastics will continue to enter our brains and bloodstreams.  Pallet after pallet of shipped goods tightly wrapped with stretch film, hospital saline bags & tubes (all considered medical waste so either burned or disposed of as hazardous waste), appliances, car bumpers, even cigarette filters (of which 4 billion are flicked out the window or tossed to the ground), grocery and produce bags by the zillions.  Stretchy waistbands,  Spandex (actual name: elastane), leggings -- as the saying goes, if it's elastic, it's plastic.  Try as we might, there may be no way out.  Recycling is growing less and less effective when it comes to plastics because each type of plastic has to be carefully sorted lest it damage the recycling plant's machinery.  Wrote author Oliver Franklin-Wallis in his book Wasteland*: More than 10,000 additives can be used to make plastics, of which around 2,400 are potentially hazardous, according to EU safety standards, including plasticizers, flame retardants, dyes, lubricants, antistatic compounds, deodorizers, and foaming agents.  The exact recipe depends on the base plastic being used and the purpose of the end product.  The plastics industry is notoriously secretive about these additives; a recent study found that more than 2,000 known plastics additives have been "hardly studied" for their impact on human health... A recent piece in Scientific American updated those figures, writing: One analysis found that 16,000 different chemicals are used in making plastics...more than 4,000 of those substances pose health or environmental danger, and safety information was lacking for another 10,000, the researchers estimate.  Recent studies show that "the leaves of plants absorb microplastics from the air", as do tested fish, shrimp, and mussels, added the article.  What was perhaps more surprising to me were the recent studies showing the amount of micro- and nano-plastics not only in our food but being released into our foods when we use microwave-"safe" bowls and steamer bags, not to mention those doggie bags coming home from eating out.  Stop microwaving plastic, wrote WIRED, especially those "steam in" and takeaway bags.

Sculpture made from recovered plastic in the ocean...

     But really, we all feel good about filling up those recycling bins, we consumers carefully doing our part by separating and perhaps even rinsing certain things before recycling them.  At the very least, it helps to divert some of the nearly 4.5 pounds of garbage each of us toss out every day --yes, day-- at least those of us in the U.S.  But head to a recycling plant and you'll be shocked to see what else ends up in those "recycle" bins, wrote the author: soiled disposable diapers, engine blocks, broken doll parts, bent patio furniture, and on and on.  His term is "wish"-cycling, that we consumers feel good that we're "doing our part" because somewhere down the line, someone will know what can or can't be recycled.  And I plead guilty at times because if I have trouble finding that arrowed-number telling me what type of plastic it is and whether it can (or cannot) be recycled, a worker facing a seemingly endless stream of such "numbers" really won't have the time since they're expected to manually sort through about 40 item per minute, a rate even recycling companies admit is physically and mentally unsustainable.  And here is where AI enters the picture (and workers get a pink slip) -- robotic "sorters" can spot those numbers and quickly separate the good from the bad at the rate of 1000 per minute, and do it all without tiring (view this explanation of the entire process of recycling from the moment you toss that can in your bin, from the Association of Plastic Recyclers -- and note the pillow and coat the sorters discover).

    The unfortunate fact is that even with such advanced sorting, most plastics can't be recycled and head to the landfill or to the incinerator anyway.  I found this out when I dismantled my 20-year old gas grill and placed the hood and such into my recycling bin.  The driver refused to pick it up, explaining that only cans were recyclable in my city.  A quick call to the waste company found that metals and such are recycled only according to what the market will pay for, and in this case, the secondary vendors who "buy" the recycled metal from our county only wanted cans...no stray bolts, no leftover aluminum straps, and certainly no stainless steel hoods from a gas grill.  And think of how much each auto repair shop heaves into their bins (each city is different so check with your local collection company).  Recent figures put the effective recycling percentage at 32% overall; but take away the most recycled product --cardboard and some papers-- and the rate drops precipitously.  For plastics, the recycling rate is just 5%, wrote TIME; but even before China banned our "junk" plastic exports, the rate was only 9%.  The rise of ever newer plastic compounds and binders and fillers drops that recycle rate even further.

     But wait, what about those big beverage companies saying that they're using recycled plastic in an effort to offset their 600 billion plastic bottles hitting shelves each year?  Wrote Frankin-Wallis:  In the early 1990s, Coca-Cola announced a goal to make its bottles from 25 percent recycled plastic, only to abandon the target four years later once consumer and political pressure had lifted.  In 2007, the company made headlines again when it set out to "recycle or reuse 100% of its plastic bottles in the U.S." and to achieve this, opened the "world's biggest PET recycling plant" in Spartanburg, South Carolina.  In reality, the company missed its recycling target and quietly shut down the plant two years later.  Coke's target of using 10 percent recycled plastic in its bottles by 2010?  Missed.  It set a target of 25 percent recycled content in its bottles by 2015 and failed to hit even half that... This is partly a failure of journalism: pledges get news coverage.  Few ever check later to see if they come true.  If you hadn't noticed the trend, the petroleum industry is not slowing down at all (since the Biden years, we have remained both the worlds largest exporter of oil and the largest exporter of plastic waste) and has actually increased production, wrote Statista.  But the increase is not destined for our cars and planes.  It's mostly headed into manufacturing plastics.  The shift to make the consumer "feel" that they're helping reduce the use of plastics doesn't actually mesh with reality as most plastics can only be re-made for another use fewer than 3 times.  Even that "made of recycled plastic" is misleading because up to 98 percent of that "recycled" bottle contains virgin plastic by the time all is said and done (meaning cleaned and cleared of contaminants); in the end, only about 2% of that recycled plastic can be used, wrote ProPublica.  The slight-of-hand advertising is used to make more plastic behind the curtain.  Wrote Scientific American: ExxonMobil has acknowledged that electric vehicles’ widespread adoption will probably reduce cars’ need for oil.  In one market forecast, the company, already the world’s largest producer of single-use plastics, assured investors that its plans to increase petrochemical production by 80 percent by 2050 will help the industry to pump and sell even more oil at mid-century than it does today...the annual output of plastic has climbed from two million metric tons in 1950 to more than 500 million today.  Added the article: A million plastic bottles are purchased each minute, according to the United Nations’ environment agency, and five trillion plastic bags are used every year.  In 2016 Americans alone used more than 560 billion plastic utensils and other disposable food-service items.  Wait, was that 5 trillion plastic bags, as in 5,000,000,000,000?  

     Well thank heavens newer biodegradable plastics have been introduced, you may say.  Except, maybe not.  Wrote the author: Most people I have met within the waste industry hate compostable plastics....Imogen Napper and Richard Thompson, two academics at the University of Plymouth, have been studying biodegradable plastics for years.  In 2016, Napper submerged five types of plastic bags --biodegradable, oxo-biodegradable, compostable, and HDPE-- into Plymouth harbor, exposed others to the air, and buried others in the soil, and left them there for three years.  The compostable bags disappeared in three months underwater but persisted in the soil for twenty-seven months.  One biodegradable bag was still intact six years later -- and is in fact still intact even now.  My city's recycling continually sends out flyers saying that anything sealed in plastic bags --even if full of aluminum cans or recyclable milk cartons-- will be pulled out entirely and tossed into the landfill; those plastic bags --kitchen bags, trash bags, lawn bags, etc.--  jam up the machinery and there is no way to efficiently slice open the bags to find out what's inside.  And yet on trash days in my city, I can walk by recycle bin after recycle bin and find many stuffed full with bulging plastic bags, all put in with good intentions but headed to the landfill along with the regular trash (the author also points out the volume of our electronic trash, and wrote: ...you'll find ten to fifty times more copper in a metric ton of electronics than in a metric ton of copper ore, and 100 times more gold per metric ton of smartphones than ore from even the most productive mine.  Multiply by the sheer quantity of devices...in 2021, tech companies sold an estimated 1.43 billion smartphones, 341 million computers, 210 million televisions, and 550 million pairs of headphones...a single e-waste recycler in China, GEM, produces more cobalt than the country's mines each year.  By one estimate, up to  7 percent of the world's gold reserves may currently be contained in e-waste.).

      Plastic is indeed in our lives.  If it stretches, it's got plastic.  If it's an aluminum can, it's got plastic (most soft drink cans have an inner resin coating).  If your walls are painted...well, you get the picture (yes, paint has plastic in it).  In a personal piece in The Atlantic, author Annie Lowrey wrote about her futile effort to avoid plastics in her daily life (she gave up): Scientists have found plastic in brains, eyeballs, and pretty much every other organ.  We cry plastic tears, leak plastic breast milk, and ejaculate plastic semen.  Fetuses contain plastic.  Plastic is so ubiquitous that researchers, wanting to examine the effect of plastics on the human body, are struggling to find all-natural individuals to use as controls in studies...Plastic is not just everywhere in our homes, but everywhere, period.  The world produces so much plastic, more than 400 hundred metric tons a year, according to one estimate (roughly the combined weight of every human alive) that degraded nubbins coat the planet, detectable in the sedimentary depths of the Mariana Trench and the icy heights of Mount Everest.  One of the biggest emitters of those microplastics?...your clothes dryer (more specifically, the act of drying clothes in those tumblers which casts off microfibers from your clothes).

     And that antiquarian push to return to fossil fuels?  No need to worry there.  As the 81-year old retired professor William Rees told The Sun in an interview (his new book is Our Ecological Impact): Ninety percent of the fossil fuel ever used by humans has been in my lifetime -- half in the past thirty to thirty-five years...The human material economy is driven by fossil energy, which means it can channel hundreds or even thousands of times more energy and material than can be sustained by the ecosystems it exploits.  Here's a quote from one of the originators of plastics, Mobil Oil (as far back as 1939): By 1987, Mobil’s Schmieder [then CEO] extolled the advantages of trashing, non-biodegradable plastic bags: “Our products,” he told Reuters, “add stability to landfills.”  That came from a piece in Orion on how the fossil fuel industry worked to sway the public away from paper and glass and onto plastics (think squeezable bottles in addition to grocery bags).  As Europe and then a few states began to ban the use of plastic bags, the industry switch gears and promoted plastic's "recycling" ability (the article is interesting if only to read about the rise of Earl Tupper and Lloyd Stoeffer, who saw the coming demand for plastic and made their names synonymous with such).  Yet when New York state banned plastic bags in 2020, the city found that such bags in the waste stream dropped by 68% over a five-year period.

     So as Spring approaches and you get ready to fix those plastic sprinkler lines, most made with PVC which can NOT be recycled by the majority of facilities (PVC also makes up many shampoo & cooking oil bottles, as well as cling wrap so don't use it to microwave your foods), nor can polystyrene (commonly called Styrofoam), nor can most products with #5, #6, or #7 which means those "takeaway" containers), the question on everyone's mind should be "what can be done?"  And there are a few innovative companies again trying, such as a company in Texas that mixes plastic with asphalt to repave roads.  Wrote The Conversation about the process: Traditional asphalt is made from a mix of stones, sand and a petroleum-based binder called bitumen, which holds everything together.  In my research team’s process, we replace a small part of that bitumen –about 8% to 10%– with melted plastic from everyday items, such single-use plastic bags and plastic bottles.  For our plastic road construction project near Dallas, we used 4.5 tons of plastic waste for nearly a mile of a one-lane road.  We first clean the plastic, then shred it into small flakes.  Finally, we mix it into the asphalt at high temperatures.  These steps ensure that it melts completely and bonds tightly, leaving no loose plastic behind.  This process is like adding rebar to concrete: The plastic adds flexibility and strength.  Roads with this mix can better handle extreme temperatures and heavy traffic.  Other companies using recycled plastic are making fuel, modular road segments, park benches, eliminating single use forks and such, but progress is slow.  As the World Resources Institute wrote: Countries spent the past three years trying to negotiate a Global Plastics Treaty to stem the rising tide of pollution.  The latest talks, in August 2025, ended in gridlock, leaving the treaty's future uncertain.  This is a true David (the consumers) taking on Goliath (the oil companies)...but perhaps, like tobacco, global attitudes will change, although the WRI report added: ...plastic consumption and waste are expected to triple by 2060.  Triple!  Added the Scientific American piece: Under President Joe Biden, the U.S. had joined calls for the treaty to limit plastic production, but in February 2025 Trump posted "BACK TO PLASTIC" on social media...

     In the meantime, continue the usual suggestions of bringing your own grocery bag/water bottle/metal straw to places, use glass containers for heating/storing foods, do NOT place your recyclables in plastic bags (or at least empty them out of the bags when putting them in the recycle trash bin), avoid single-use cutlery (nice try if you're at that deli in Hoboken), etc. and etc.  Not to sound so blasé but most of you are doing all of that already...and this is Big Oil we're talking about.  Then again, there's always the velvet worm which researchers are finding can teach us a thing or two on bioplastics (what??).  So chin up, keep on keeping on, and maybe if enough of us do our little bit, we can make that phrase "each raindrop adds to an ocean" become a reality.  Since plastic is apparently already in our brains, why not use it and "stretch" our imagination.  The possibilities, like plastic, may be endless...

Plastic ocean by artist Tan Zi Xi

*Franklin-Wallis' book goes into far more than plastics, diving (unfortunately) into the polluted world of the rivers of India where tanning hides sends millions of gallons of toxic chemicals into waters which people drink and also use to honor their dead relatives; he moves into our fast-fashion industry and how today's fibers are of little use even as scrap (ever tried to clean a mirror with one of today' tees?), and so are shipped off to Africa as a feel-good charitable move (and a tax write-off) with one market alone receiving 15 million garments each week (to make matters worse, he writes that 85% --yes, eighty-five percent-- of all textiles in the U.S. "are landfilled or incinerated.").  Then it's on to sewage (baby wipes are the bane of the industry), food waste, chemical waste, electronic waste.  He adds this as he prepares to leave the tanning shops of Kanpur in India and spots something behind a series of stalls on an "otherwise ordinary street": It's a waste dump, several football fields in size.  The entire place is carpeted with leather scraps, the color of a pale horse.  The dried-out hides bend and crackle underfoot, water pooling in cracks between the skins, the same vivid green on the roadside (that's the tell-tale sign of toxic chromium used in tanning leather).  Goats and chickens are picking through the waste for food.  It's a desolate sight, like something out of a Cormac McCarthy novel.  A monument to slaughter.  I wander among the dead skins, thinking about how little we truly see of the way things are made, and how little we understand the true cost.  For the first time in my entire journey, I feel sick.