Time to stop recycling plastics…
Since for what seems like forever we have been told that to save the environment we need to dispose of our created waste responsibly and recycle whatever we can whenever we can. Including the plastic containers that many of the products we consume daily come packaged. We’ve been told that keeping the world from being buried in our plastic waste is to make sure we recycle every piece of the ever present material that we can so that it can be converted into a new material/product of value and function.
Now I come across a piece in the Washington Post that says that message is a crock… it’s balderdash… a myth. And that the time has come for us to stop “recycling” plastic.
Why?
Because plastic as a material is not recyclable. Because unlike paper, glass and metal, plastic is not easily or efficiently turned into new products. And that to actually “recycle” plastic it is very expensive, an inefficient use of energy and in fact toxic. In very simple terms… it’s killing us.
And to top it all off to recycle our plastic waste into new and usable materials and products it requires adding a shocking amount of new virgin plastic … around 70%… into the recycling process. Because without that addition of that virgin plastic the recycled plastic can’t be converted into anything at all usable… the virgin plastic is necessary to hold everything together in the new finished recycled product.
And, as the article informs me, “as a result, only about 5 percent of plastic gets ‘recycled’ (or, more accurately, ‘downcycled’ into a product of inferior quality).
The article goes on to say that since we have been actively trying to get better at plastic recycling since the 1970s, 5% “represents a colossal, unequivocal failure.”
But the final crushing piece of evidence that says we should not bother with recycling our plastic waste is that plastic itself is not healthy in any manner for we the people or for the environment that we exist within.
All plastic is made from two ingredients: fossil fuels and toxic chemicals.
And the toxic stuff being used are some very bad materials… heavy metals, per/polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), flame retardants and persistent organic pollutants.
AND… to produce the plastic we use every day it takes tens of thousands of proprietary chemical formulas and most of have never been tested for their effects on human health, although many are known to be endocrine disruptors, fertility inhibitors and carcinogens.
Studies have shown that when used plastic materials get ground up, melted and reformed into a pile of recycled plastic (with the addition of lots of new virgin plastic to bind it together), all those thousands of toxic plastic chemicals combine to make a Frankenstein material that has what scientists call “non-intentionally added substances” in it. Chemicals that are not supposed to be there suddenly start appearing all over the spectrum.
The bottom line is that you really don’t want anything you consume… in particular food… packaged in recycled, mystery-ingredient plastic.
The other problem with recycled plastic is that we have the growing and deeply troubling aspect of plastic called microplastics. The chemical composition of all plastic… it doesn’t matter what type of plastic is being considered… is a synthetic polymer that doesn’t break down or go away. Ever.
What happens to all plastic is that it keeps breaking up into smaller and smaller pieces until it turns into microplastics and eventually something called nanoplastics. And these minute plastic particles are still very toxic and poisonous to we the people and the environment as they can be. But pow that these materials are in such aa minuscule form we wind up eating and breathing them all the time. Studies have disturbingly shown that microplastics are being discovered in human lungs, the bloodstream and in breastmilk, as well as in the placenta of unborn babies. In addition scientists have found microplastics in sperm, testes and the brain.
The overall effect of all this plastic in our bodies is still being studied and discovered but what is being revealed is not at all a pleasant or desirable conclusion.
A recent study concluded that the disease burden from plastic exposure includes preterm birth, obesity, heart disease and cancer, and that in 2018 alone the health-care cost was $249 billion.
As the Post article says… The human body has become the trash can of our plastics-addicted culture.
And when we recycle plastic the simple reality is it makes the problem that microplastics present even more worse than anyone can even begin to conceive. One study of just one plastics recycling facility found that it might be washing 3 million pounds of microplastics into its wastewater every year.
And all of those millions of pounds of microplastics wind up getting our ground soils and water systems… or simply dumped into our environment.
Whether we wish to acknowledge the fact or not… every one of us have microplastics coursing through our bodies.
The end conclusion to all of this is we need to treat plastic like the toxic waste it is and send it where it can hurt people the least.
And at his point in time the only “safe” place is in some landfill in some very remote area that is off limits to all living organisms as can be accomplished.
Then we need to get to work on the real solution…. stop making plastic and start using nontoxic materials in place of the stuff that is used to make plastic.
Organic materials such as hemp or bamboo or sugarcane.
Another thousand words…
Leave a Reply