Climate Action Day 44 – Cut Down on Plastics

Shopping and Consumer Choices

The Frog will explore The Climate Action Handbook: A Visual Guide to 100 Climate Solutions by Heidi Roop in the first 100 days of 2024

“There’s a great future in plastics”, Mr. McGuire says to Benjamin in the film The Graduate, released in 1967. We are a plastics driven society. They are ubiquitous. From an energy standpoint, you can convince yourself that compared to high energy processes for other materials like glass and aluminum, plastic packaging is an energy efficient alternative. But their versatility and widespread use comes at a cost, in the greenhouse gas emissions from their production, transportation and use, accumulated mass in landfills, and widespread plastics pollution on land and at sea.

Ocean and shore pollution has surprising sources. For instance, 5 million tons of debris was washed into the Pacific Ocean during the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011. Source.

Plastics are produced from fossil carbon pumped up from storage in the earth in the form of crude oil. The simplest commercial plastic and most widely used is polyethylene, which is very simple, large hydrocarbon molecule that has useful properties for packaging and other commodity uses. If you think in terms of coal plants, the number for plastics production for use is 189. That is, the annual emissions from the production of plastics globally is equivalent to 189 coal plants polluting around the clock.

Without a wholesale change in attitudes on plastics consumption and recycling, those associated emissions will unsustainably increase and the downstream problems of disposal and pollution will only get worse.

What we really must address is plastics packaging, which is what we most encounter in our daily lives. It represents 40% of the plastics production and is most likely to be discarded after a single use, often in the store parking lot or on the side of the road. Most consumers do not stop and reflect on the impact that single-use packaging has on their lives, and their community. When surveyed, 71% of Americans state that they “use fewer single-use plastics to help protect the environment”.

As great deal of trash is treated as “waste-to-energy”, or burned to generate electricity. Often this is done in plants located in disadvantaged communities that cannot escape the chemical pollution and reduced air quality from the plants, even while utilizing the electricity from the source. Waste-to-energy can also be used as a questionable carbon offset that can be used by companies and governments in their calculation of their carbon footprint. Mother Jones is critical of the practice.

It is hard to go plastics free. Recently we informed our local high-end grocery store that they had a choice to source alternative bags to package their fresh baked bread – the ones they supplied inexplicably had a plastic window that rendered them unrecyclable.

Your lifestyle dictates what we can do, and add your voice to society to rapidly establish a circular economy that addresses plastics waste. Review your habits and adopt processes that reduce plastics while maintaining convenience, like keeping reusable shopping bags in your car for your use at the store. Review your county’s recycling policies and adhere to them to reduce the impact on your local recycling sorting center. Consider services like Ridwell, which (for a fee) will help you “sustainably reuse and recycle your stuff”. T

There may indeed be a great future in plastics, a future where their use is limited, circular, and has minimal impact on the environment. The plastics industry is responsible for making this a reality, and may only be motivated by emerging global regulation. As Heidi says “it is critical to encourage the manufacturing industry to accelerate the reduction, recycling, reuse and remanufacturing of plastic and invest in innovations to reduce the climate and environmental impacts of plastic”. Your voice is critical to drive them to act.

Next Up: Climate Action in 2024 – Day 45: Avoid Microplastics

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