The Plastic Issue and a Call to Action
By Jenny Tamminga My heart has been aching in the past months as I have seen videos of Third World countries with plastic trash covering entire beaches, of rivers and bays with so much plastic trash you can only tell there is water because the trash is undulating up and down with the waves, or it is slowly flowing away with the clogged current of the river. Many communities in these areas have no trash collection systems and no place to bring their trash, so people throw their trash in the rivers or bring it to the beach. The western world doesn't have this severe of a problem, thanks to our collection systems, but we still have people using pristine areas to dump trash and larger items. I recently saw 5 couches, a stack of plastic chairs, lots of household trash, and a broken hot tub out in the desert near Phoenix, and my husband told me of mounds of trash in our own Superman Canyon that he saw on a recent bike ride. Empty water bottles and other plastic items can be found wherever we go: on the ground in our majestic redwood forests, in our deserts, and in even in and around our most pristine rivers and lakes. A lot of this plastic, in third world countries and western world alike, then flows on down to our oceans 54
March 2020
harming the earth at every step of its journey. We have a world that is an amazing treasure. It has unboundless beauty and provides us with all we need to thrive, yet we seem to be determined to destroy it with plastic. A few months ago, I listened to a podcast about recycling, which explained that most of our recycling in past years was being sent to China along with plastic from other countries, but China closed its ports to the world's plastics in 2018. The western world then had a great dilemma: what to do with the tons of plastic we previously sent away to be recycled—letting others deal with our mess. With further research, I discovered that, after China closed its ports to outside plastic waste, western countries began looking for another place to send it. Since Hong Kong was the gateway to the Chinese recycling facilities, Hong Kong now has fields and warehouses full of plastic that nobody wants. The Americas and Australia then found markets for their plastic in Malaysia, but these have now been shut down by the Malaysian government and Malaysia has stated that they will not be the world's garbage dump (good point). Poland also has sites full of foreign plastic that are not getting recycled. Now, there are mountains
of plastic, in hundreds of sites, not getting recycled around the world all because the UK, Canada, the United States, and Australia (these are just the ones I read about) want to export their waste instead of building infrastructure and regulations to reduce its use and recycle it. The amount of plastics produced each year is increasing at an alarming rate, one site predicted that plastic production would increase 75% by 2022, and we are already producing 350 million tons a year! Plastic is durable and lasts a long time, but every phase of its life impacts the environment and our health. Plastics are made from crude oil and natural gas (according to ICIS, 20% of the world's oil production is used to manufacture plastic), extracting these products produces greenhouse gasses and pollutes fresh water sources and its production adds more greenhouse gasses and pollution. When food is sold, purchased, and stored in plastic in our homes, some of the chemicals it contains leaks into our food. Its disposal adds even more greenhouse gasses and pollutants: over one-third of plastic waste goes to landfills, some gets burned (burning plastic emits toxins known to cause respiratory ailments and stress human immune systems), only 9% of the world's
