07
Jan

Paper or Plastic?

Published on January 7th, 2014

Significant Plastic Problems Still Remain in a California without Plastic Bags

Breaking California’s decades-long reliance on the convenience of plastic bags, local governments across the Golden State are banning single-use plastic bags in supermarkets, chain drug stores and, in some cases, all retailers. Recent legal victories have upheld bag bans in San Francisco, Marin County, San Luis Obispo County and Los Angeles County. These developments are definitive environmental wins, but they should not give a false sense of security on the overall problem with plastics.

Banning single-use bags barely scratches the surface in terms of our plastic lifestyles. There still are countless products that directly or indirectly use plastics, from household supplies and electronics to furniture, medical equipment, diapers, clothing, toys, automobiles, construction materials and virtually all packaging. It’s a challenge to think of a single product that isn’t associated with plastic.

Plastic is problematic for many reasons – take for example the numerous plastics that end up at sea. They can’t be broken down into harmless compounds in the same way most organic materials are able to biodegrade. In the ocean, a process called photo degradation only physically breaks plastic products into progressively smaller pieces, while the plastic fragments remain chemically intact for hundreds of years. That fact should be worrying given that various plastic chemicals can be toxic and have been linked to cancers.

Characteristics of plastic that allow for accumulation of pollutants on its surface, and a similar appearance to “natural” marine life food, assist harmful chemicals in infiltrating the food chain. We’ve seen heart-wrenching images of turtles and seals caught in the plastic rings from six-pack cans. We know with certainty that wildlife is harmed by this garbage in their habitats. Still troubling is the fact that it’s largely unknown to what extent these chemicals will make their way into the human population as we consume fish and other marine organisms that live amongst our plastic waste.

To clarify, even if all plastic bag production ceases today, which it won’t, there are many types of plastic that will continue to disrupt oceanic ecology. “Nurdles,” tiny pre-production plastic pellets, are the basic building block of almost all plastic products. They are found in the ocean by the billions and will continue to make their way there as long as our society uses any kind of plastic products.

Issues with plastic run much deeper than just troubles at sea. Further problems include its contribution to air pollution when extremely toxic gases (trichloroethane, nickel, ethylene oxide and others) are released during production, the transferring of hormone-altering and reproductive health-compromising chemicals to our bodies through contact with our food, or even just the unsightly trash that litters many city streets and parks.

The source of the “plastic plague,” as some have come to call it, is ultimately a product of our per capita plastic consumption and population size. With plastic use extremely likely to continue as a major part of our lives – what about our numbers?

For the foreseeable future, more people will lead to more plastic waste in absolute terms, exactly the opposite of what needs to happen. If California lawmakers and activists were consistent in their approach to halting the plastic plague, they would reflect this in pushing for a coordination of policies. We would be addressing curbing the predicted huge statewide population increases to help limit the generation of plastic waste into the future.

It comes down to a simple question. In terms of the plastics issue, is California in a position to increase its population by the predicted 20 million in less than four decades? The clear answer is NO. Significantly more people and plastic product consumption will make the large-scale, long-term plastic problems that we are grappling with all the worse.

 

Founder of the Algalita Marine Research Institute with a sample from a heavily polluted region of the Pacific, where by weight, plastic to zooplankton ratios can be higher than 6 to 1.

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