It’s no real stretch to say that plastic is as vilified as coal is in the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum of the contemporary theology of Environmentalism. Green-besotted governments are banning plastic with the same zeal as witch-hunters once banished heretics.
As usual, though, the watermelon zealots have got nearly everything wrong.
While it’s certainly true that plastic waste is a global problem, the green-left have mostly misdiagnosed the problem and are feverishly applying the wrong solutions. When we talk of “ocean plastics” and the “great Pacific garbage patch”, we’re not talking about something like your local tip floating on the ocean. In fact, you’d sail right through the Pacific garbage patch and likely never notice it. Not only is most of the plastic waste spread over a vast area, most of it has broken down into “microplastic” beads.
And it’s not the straws or shopping bags of California or New Zealand that are the problem: 90% of the plastic waste in the oceans comes from Asia and, to a lesser extent, Africa. The bulk of solid plastics in the Atlantic are drink bottles tossed overboard from Chinese ships.
Guinea is one of the poorest countries in the world, which means that in a lot of places there’s little to no waste management. Instead, many people dump their trash by the roadside — and a major portion of it is plastic.
“So in cities along the coast, it’s really not uncommon to find that the ditches are full of trash,” [Erika] Erickson said. “And then after a big rainstorm, that’s all floated down and is covering the beach.”
Farther inland, piles of plastic waste meet a different fate — burning.
But, for all that, plastic is an incredibly useful resource. Especially in poor countries like Guinea.
“We’re talking about a place where there are no sinks, there’s no running water,” Erickson said.
As a result, people — often women — are tasked with the grueling job of fetching water on foot for drinking, cooking, and cleaning.
“Without a large assortment of plastic jugs to carry that in, it’s just a really complicated ordeal,” Erickson said[…]Plastic also made it much easier to access and transport potable water, which is sold in small plastic sachets.
“This is an indispensable resource for keeping people healthy.” That’s especially true, Erickson says, for people who are sick, children, and the elderly.
“So you could get clean water; things that had been exorbitantly expensive supplies to get before were available at a price that people could afford,” Erickson said. “And so it was a really necessary thing, I think, for development and for bringing people’s standards of living up to a place where there’s less illness and a lot more comfort.”
Yet, all that useful plastic ends up as waste eventually. Enter recycling.
This is yet another instance of where the green-left get it all wrong. Rather than banning the stuff and returning to an imaginary pre-industrial, pre-technological state-of-nature, the answer is more and better technology. Specifically, plastivores.
What if there were a way to break plastic down to its constituent parts — parts that would either not be harmful to the environment, or could be reused to make new plastics?
As it turns out, there is something that has that ability, but it’s not some kind of solvent, or chemical process — it’s a life form called “plastivores.”
“Individual organisms that use plastic as their primary carbon and energy source,” Erickson said. “So they can live off of nothing but plastic, which is pretty wild to think about.”
Japanese scientists first identified plastivores in 2016, as bacteria that “ate” PET bottles. But, in a serendipity akin to the discovery of penicillin, a Canadian biologist made an even more startling discovery.
Canadian biologist Christophe Lemoine said a European team made the discovery in 2017, entirely by accident.
“Kind of the funny story behind that is that one of the team members is actually a beekeeper,” Lemoine said. “And what happened is that she was just cleaning her hive and found some of those wax worms, put them in a plastic bag, wrapped them up, put them on the kitchen counter, and a couple of hours later, the wax worms were happily sneaking their way out of the plastic bag. So that’s kinda what put the wax worm on the international scene.”
The key to plastivores’ remarkable abilities are the enzymes that allow them to break the plastic down. Identifying and applying these enzymes on an industrial scale is the target of new research into better plastic recycling. French biochemical engineer Alain Marty hopes to have a demo plant running later this year, and an industrial plant in 2024.
Carbios, the company Marty works for, aims to rapidly break PET plastic down to its constituent elements, pure enough to reform plastic of equal quality to the original.
Carbios has already scored investment from major companies like L’Oreal and PepsiCo, Marty said, and the goal is to open recycling plants around the world, capable of handling 100,000-200,000 tons of plastic every year.
But PET is only one type of plastic (although one of the most common). The challenge will be to adapt the process to other plastics – and to invent new plastics with end-of-life in mind.
Other scientists argue that we should decrease plastic use in general.
If only the stuff weren’t so darn useful.
We have to remember that plastic waste isn’t just wrappers and straws — in places like the Guinean village where Erickson lived, it’s health, clean water, and resources and workforce hours that would all need to be replaced.
Whyy
Please share this article so that others can discover The BFD