I know plastic is burned, plastic itself is upsetting

Comments on "Outraged that some plastic you send for recycling ends up being burned? Don’t be".

This is a response to an article published in the Guardian on October 4th, 2024, Outraged that some plastic you send for recycling ends up being burned? Don’t be by James Piper (I’ve shorten the title to “Outraged”). Outraged is a defence of plastic that follows an investigation by Everyday Plastic and the Environmental Investigation Agency, which found 70% of tracked soft plastics sent to be recycled ended up in incinerators.

Plastic fragments I found near a logging site in a Swedish forest. Some microplastics, some not.

“So how do we ensure that less soft plastic ends up in an incinerator? Well, we need to rebalance the economics. The government must restrict exports of waste and maintain its commitment to collect flexible plastic from kerbsides in England by 2027. This would ensure that soft plastic is collected in significant volumes, drive innovation and investment into the UK recycling system, and ultimately increase the value of soft plastic to the waste companies dealing with it. This would be far preferable to ending the use of what is a lightweight and incredibly efficient piece of packaging” — James Piper, Outraged that some plastic you send for recycling ends up being burned? Don’t be.

Preventing plastic waste from leaving England could look something like what happened in 2019 when China refused to be the world’s garbage dump. In Canada, Calgary made national news as storage costs for clamshell plastics began to exceed $300,000. So the city buried them in the landfill at the cost of another $130,000. Is this the innovation and investment Piper envisions?

Piper’s Outraged hope for plastic is surprisingly similar to Exxon’s vision of advanced recycling, which Emily Sanders from ExxonKnews covers in Exxon’s “advanced recycling” claims land in court. I highly recommend giving it a read. Advanced recycling is a lie designed to ease concerns about plastic pollution and continue business as usual. As Sanders points out, Exxon’s 2026 vision aims to recycle less than 1% of its plastic — because most plastics are not recyclable. Exxon knows they are lying. They have been lying for decades.

The economics of plastic is it's cheap. It's a petroleum waste product, popularized in a time of ecological ignorance. The benefit of a cheap product is its throw away value. Pursuing policies that seek to increase the value of plastic as a means of incentivizing recycling, as Piper is advocating, completely undermines its economic justification.

The design of supply chains should pay closer adherence to the first two of the three Rs. Reduce consumption; reuse what we already have; and recycle only when absolutely necessary. A companion R is Refuse. Piper expresses concern that paper straws might lead to the production of more waste compared with plastic straws. Refuse both and encourage others to do the same. Plastic and paper straws contain forever chemicals anyway. The persistence of forever chemicals “may lead to…liver damage, thyroid disease, obesity, fertility issues and cancer”.

Soft plastics contain plasticizers. Plasticizers detach from their plastic packaging and contaminate food contained within. So much for the idea that plastic is sanitary. An article in Toxins by Po-Chin Huang and Wei-Chun Chou states “...prolonged and low-dose exposure to plasticizers may have deleterious effects on the endocrine, reproductive, and neurological systems, potentially engendering the onset of chronic diseases”.

Piper argues that incinerating plastic is better than dumping it in landfills because it’s being used to generate energy. Microplastics have been found in the sky, which has implications for the climate. The burning of plastics is suspect, as incineration pumps tiny fragments of plastics directly into the sky. It's almost impossible to avoid ingesting microplastics, now found in genitals, for crying out loud! Microplastics may cause “various cancers, respiratory disorders, and inflammatory bowel disease”. The risk of disease and infertility caused by plastic pollution doesn’t only have implications for humans. Microplastics and forever chemicals are everywhere, putting all humans and nonhuman animals at risk. The connection between health and plastic is not mentioned in Outraged.

Commitments to promises of future recycling schemes that may or may not materialize allows for higher concentrations of plasticizers, forever chemicals, and microplastics in the biosphere. Even if we had the best possible recycling systems, the sheer volume of plastic consumption ensures that there will be litter that finds its way into the ground and water. That’s why every human object should be made from stuff that won’t cause cancer if it’s accidentially unleashed into the wild.

A common line of argument in favour of plastic, not missed by Piper, is that the light weight of plastic helps to reduce shipping emissions. Distance is never seen as a problem. We in rich countries are helplessly depenedent on people in poor countries to produce for us — a highly privledged person like myself contributes nothing life sustaining. Localized production that focuses on shortening supply chains would reduce shipping emissions. That means more support for small scale local farmers to increase the capacity for food production closer to where people live. Food directly from farmers doesn’t need to be packaged at all. You can put it in your backpack or basket. If the farmer offers a bag, you can refuse it.

Bringing food production into cities requires a restructing of space in some cases. In others, it means getting to work converting lawns and other underutilized spaces into vegetable gardens — as Alexandra Daum and I suggested here.

Glass bottle exchanges and the option to refill containers brought from home are some other tangible solutions that reduce the need for packaging.

I used to work for a rice company. My job involved transferring rice from 20 kilogram burlap sacks into 200 gram plastic bags. If you have never done a job like this, imagine filling 400 bags per hour for eight hours a day for minimum wage, and that’s all you do for the rest of your life. It’s a version of hell. The company needed to create a product to sell and this is what they came up with. They wriggle themselves into the economy by lengthening supply chains and adding plastic packaging with their logo on it — call it innovation. The company gets a pat on the back for creating jobs, misery, and plastic pollution. A big bags stores where people can bring container brought from home to fell themselves reduces waste, both material and time. If that means saying goodbye to a shitty company, all the better. Our economy first has to change from job dependency to free association so no one is left behind.

Investing more deeply into plastic infrastructure, binding livelihoods to the plastic industry worsens plastic dependency. That’s why promises of improved recycling programmes should not be pursued. Only safe, time tested, and reusable materials should be used, like glass and tin. Both are free from forever chemicals, plasticizers, and don’t produce microplastics. They are recycleable, too, if they should break. Bags made from cotton, hemp, flax, wood fibre are other options.

We should be bold in our demands and dreams of the most ridiculous ecological utopias. Reality is always going to fall short of our dreams, so our imaginiation needs to be all the more ambitious. Plans for improved recycling systems will be bungled and the plastic mess will remain, but if actively commit to a 100% plastic free society by 2027, we will be all the more closer to achieving that goal.

The costs of the plastic age has caught up with us and we are paying in health and ecosystem. We don't need a better plastic system. We need to figure out how to remove plastics from our bodies and planet, but until then let's wean ourselves off plastic. Let’s fight the plastic industry.