Plastic!

A very good friend of mine wrote me recently and posed the following:

"Regarding your blog - Victoria recently decided to ban the use of plastic bags.   I believe PEI recently did this as well. In my view, this is long overdue, given the very negative environmental impact of plastics. A friend of mine recently returned from Hawaii on a cruise ship - he said they passed through the edge of the great pacific plastic vortex - and that it was mind-boggling and frightening, not to mention ugly. I wonder if this might be a potential subject for your investigative and blogging skills.   I think plastic bottles are also a complete aberration with an immense environmental impact."

I agree with him 100% that this is a topic worth discussing! Unfortunately I have a much more jaded view. For example my wife once made "poofs" - a hollow fabric valance that went above the drapes in our living room. They are kept in shape by stuffing with something such as plastic bags. And that is what we stuffed ours with.  Several years later she wanted a change so we took them down. In removing the plastic bags they pretty much disintegrated into dust. Even though "protected" by the fabric enough radiation from sunlight and heat got to them and they decomposed.  The phenomenon experienced is "photo-degradation". It was then that I realized one of the worst things we can do with plastic in general is bury it in landfill where these natural forces cannot operate.

The Pacific Vortex is also known as the "Pacific Gyre". The National Geographic has posted a description of this natural phenomenon that is the product of circulating water and wind currents and even though also called the plastic vortex" includes all sorts of refuse that floats. Ironically this vortex is not the floating "garbage patch" it is described as. Even the pictures that typically are used to illustrate, especially last year, are not of the gyre but are masses of debris typically downwind of  areas devastated by recent hurricanes (watch for mountains in the back ground!).

So it is not the plastic bags per se, or plastic in general that should be the issue.  It is how we treat our waste. Banning something does nothing positive but give virtue signals. To illustrate, around where I now live you no longer can burn refuse, including plastic, even though it is made of "organic" natural materials - they are carbon based compounds. And many of our small dumps are being closed and rules added to what and how much can go to land fill. What has been the response? Because they no longer have a simple way of handling this waste and with no viable alternatives given they instead sneak out to seldom used rural areas and dump their unwanted waste. In countries that border oceans it is far too easy to just dump refuse overboard because of such "noble" rules such as banning plastic bags. Now think about this. Due to these "environmental" rules are we better off? Is the environment better off?

The real problem is not plastics and the imposition of new laws banning various plastic items, including bags and even straws. The problem is with our "environmentalists" in that they are great at identifying a problem but fail to provide rational solutions. And there are solutions! For example I came across a news item about how in India they use granulated plastic as aggregate for asphalt and thus pave roads with this material.

I for one have bought into the 3 R's - Recycle, Reuse or Repurpose. Why? Because it makes economic as well as environmental sense! It is not perfect as currently implemented, again as we are seeing in the news China is now refusing to take our plastic waste so it can be recycled. So what we have created by our efforts to "recycle" is to offload our problem to others! Another example was that Toronto used to do by shipping their garbage to Michigan! Why do this when there are technologies that could easily be implemented, such as high temperature incinerators with associated processing of the off gases? Because "environmentalists" refuse to support those technologies as they "pollute". Every time there is a viable means of controlling our solid waste issues, including plastics, "environmentalists" jump on the same tiresome band wagon and say "we can't do that!" and the politicians are cowed and fall back on the typical "solution" that does nothing to solve the problem - ban it or ship it somewhere else to be dealt with!

If "environmentalists" want to be taken seriously they need to start coming up with and strongly supporting viable solutions and stop putting up road blocks to solutions being proposed by others. Life is a compromise as there is no perfect solution. Face that fact head on and in doing so actually start making a difference!

"Plastics" are not the problem. It is the standard  response of "banning" things and the standard "not in my back yard" mentality to viable solutions that results in encouraging bad behaviour and in doing so make a bad situation worse.

We started by mentioning Victoria. Remember, this is one of the very few cities in Canada that still dumps untreated sewage directly into the Pacific Ocean. And they think they can make a difference by banning plastic bags? Typical of a place with a high proportion of "environmentalists" - to "solve" a "problem" ban plastic bags yet dump untreated crap into the ocean. Great way to set the moral bar as high as possible - not!