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The diagram is a rough draft and meant to be a generic representation of the lifespan of synthetic plastics. Quantities are only ballpark approximations.
The strength of the diagram is that it shows the overall picture of plastics at a glance.
Key points:
1. Synthetic plastics are accelerating climate breakdown, hastening the destruction of biodiversity and causing a human health and social injustice crisis.
2. The plastic industry often talk of the 'plastic value chain' but this must be balanced by the 'plastic destruction chain.'
3. Plastics are inherently linear materials.
4. Plastics do not have a lifecycle, they have a lifespan.
5. Their lifespan is in four parts:
Parts A, B, and C take seconds, hours, years and occasionally decades:
A. Extraction of raw materials - Causes destruction of habitats, pollution and uses a great deal of energy.
B. Manufacture of plastics - Uses and contaminates masses of clean water, releases toxins, is energy intensive, may use up almost a third of our remaining carbon budget by 2050.
C. Use of plastics - causes fugitive flows, tire dust, fibres from clothes, debris from paints, fragmentation and litter. Contaminates people's homes and bodies and the environment.
Part D, lasts essentially forever:
D. Toxic waste and pollution:
There is a lack of knowledge of the fate of used plastic. We don’t know accurately how much is incinerated, burnt, dumped or escapes worldwide. The diagram shows production at 450Mt and waste generation at possibly 430Mt, but it may be higher than this. Most post ‘recycled’ plastic ends up as toxic waste or pollution of some kind.
- If it's incinerated it releases CO2 and creates highly toxic fly ash that has to be stored for the foreseeable future.
- If it's sent to landfills it releases methane and tends to contaminate groundwater and may escape.
- If it's burned in the open it releases many toxic chemicals such as Furans, Dioxins, Styrene, Butadiene, Phthalates, PAHs, PFAS, PCBs, etc.
- When it escapes, it fragments and releases GHGs and various toxic organic and inorganic substances and particles.
- It's most often poorer people, on the frontline or fence line of plastic manufacturing and disposal, who are exposed to the highest levels of contamination.
6. So-called 'recycling' is a small part of 'how we use plastics' in the economy, it does not stop them from becoming toxic waste or pollution.
For these reasons we need to significantly reduce worldwide plastic manufacturing and we must transition to systems of manufacture and consumption that are truly and continuously circular. The type of synthetic plastics that we currently mass produce can only play a minor role in this.
Also, Hogben, makes these points about how the industry defines the issues.
Should we choose glass, paper, aluminium, plastics or something else?
Here are some of the arguments used by the plastics industry along with counter arguments:
They say plastic is ''lightweight, durable and cheap''…
It's no more lightweight than some biodegradable alternatives.
There are alternatives which are just as durable.
It's only ''affordable'' because it doesn't bear its true cost which will make it many times more expensive in the long run.
They say it has an ''image problem''…
Yes, people are worried about the toxicity of plastics and the harm it causes to nature. The industry would like it to have a better image so they can sell more.
They say it can be reused…
This creates many problems. The longer it’s used the more it degrades, which accelerates the speed at which it sheds particles. Plastics can also take up other toxins and pathogens. Reuse only delays the time of disposal.
They say it should be made ‘more circular’...
Recycling something once or twice makes it more curvy-linear, NOT more circular, as it will still end in waste.
The only way a system can become more circular, is if more elements within it become truly circular, which means going round and round continuously - as materials do in nature.
They say it can be recycled …
It can only, at best, be downcycled. Plastics degrade when they are reprocessed, which means they are always on a journey to becoming worthless toxic waste. There are no examples of plastics being kept continuously in the economy at scale, through recycling.
They say PET and HDPE are ''widely recycled'' but in truth they are only ever downcycled, these plastics cannot stay in the economy permanently.
Even bottle to bottle recycling continuously syphons off old plastic and replaces it with virgin plastic within just a few recycling cycles.
They say recycling reduces demand for virgin plastic ...
But have the industry considered that ‘recycling’ sanitises and justifies the continued use and expansion of plastic manufacturing, by giving false hope of circularity. So far in the story of plastics, any savings from using recycled content have been continuously overwhelmed by the increasing world market.
They say to choose products with recycled content – ‘this keeps plastic in circulation and out of landfills and the environment’ ...
Have the industry considered that ‘recycling’ only slightly delays it going to landfill or finding its way to the oceans or other delicate habitats or into the human body.
They often say that biodegradable alternatives or bio-plastics are just as environmentally harmful, or worse than petro-plastics ...
This may be true for many alternatives, but importantly not for all. Clearly it is the alternatives that are not harmful that we must carefully scale up. However it will not be possible to simply replace plastics with alternatives, there won’t be enough for this. What we need is fundamentally new, non-toxic, truly circular systems. Petro-plastics can only play a tiny role in this.
A new, truly circular economy, powered by renewable or low carbon energy, will give ongoing prosperity for future generations.
If we continue with toxic, linear, dead end systems and materials, we will soon destroy the worlds ecological systems which support life as we know it.
In addition, Hogben points out that the research about plastic particles in glass bottles could be used in misleading ways. "This is a plastic problem, NOT a glass problem," he says. " Glass does NOT shed micro plastics. This is just more evidence of the dangers of using plastics for any element of our systems."
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