By Mike Buza & Heather Sisto (Sierra Club Nepessing Group)
The national Sierra Club campaign for a “Plastics Free July” successfully spread awareness of the non-sustainable nature of all plastic, and Michigan’s Lobby Day focused on legislation allowing cities to ban single-use plastic and for the state to accept ALL plastic bottles as returnable. SC chapters throughout the state had record participation, but let’s not rest our laurels. We can’t stop at banning single-use plastic and assume that plastic labeled for recycling is somehow okay.
Recycling in this country is broken and indeed has really never worked. When the program launched, Franklin, New Hampshire could break even on recycling by selling it for $6 a ton. As of March 2019, the transfer station is charging the town $125 a ton to recycle, or $68 a ton to incinerate.
The same thing is happening across the country. Broadway, Virginia had a recycling program for 22 years but recently suspended it after Waste Management told the town that prices would increase by 63 percent and then stopped offering recycling pickup as a service. “It almost feels illegal to throw plastic bottles away,” bemoans/laments the town manager, Kyle O’Brien.
Without a market for mixed paper, bales of the stuff started to pile up in Blaine County, Idaho; the county eventually stopped collecting it and took the 35 bales it had hoped to recycle to a landfill. The town of Fort Edward, New York, suspended its recycling program in July and admitted it had actually been taking recycling to an incinerator for months. Determined to hold out until the market turns around, the nonprofit Keep Northern Illinois Beautiful has collected 400,000 tons of plastic. But for now, it is piling the bales behind the facility where it collects plastic.
We see other packaging popping up, so we may be fooled into thinking these are viable alternatives to plastic, but very few facilities exist that can handle layered cartons (of aluminum, plastic and paper) such as TetraPaks. We want to be careful not to replace one problem with another one. Lack of long-term planning is what got us into this mess in the first place.
The end of viable recycling comes at a time when the United States is creating more waste than ever. In 2015, the most recent year for which national data is available, America generated 262.4 million tons of waste, up 4.5 percent from 2010 and 60 percent from 1985. That amounts to nearly five pounds per person a day. New York City collected 934 tons of metal, plastic, and glass a day from residents last year, a 33 percent increase from 2013.
Read: ‘We are all accumulating mountains of things.’
So now what? While we wean ourselves from wasteful consumption, we still need basic necessities like food and personal hygiene items. Some SC regional chapters are adding a “Plastics Alternatives” column to their newsletters with “Readers’ Choice” ratings of brands and suppliers of reusable shopping bags, returnable aluminum cans of hair and skin care products, and products packaged in aluminum or paper. Other support groups are posting blogs and pushing the message out on social media including links to local sources that require no packaging at all such as farm produce and bar soap.
Others suggest lobbying local grocers to influence the products they carry and how produce is displayed. It’s disheartening to learn that healthy, non-GMO foods often come in plastic while they could use cellophane or other biodegradable material. Another tactic is putting pressure on large corporations or restaurant chains to use alternative packaging (or after COVID, allowing customers to bring their own take-away containers).
Once a more favorable administration is in place, federal legislation may be the next step. The federal “Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act” introduced in February was a step in the right direction such as calling for a “pause on creating new plastic producing plants.” But the provisions for clearer recycling labels are too weak. At each stage of a product’s life (source materials, manufacturing processes, use-phase, and end of life) there needs to be consideration of the chemicals selected, the health effects on workers and consumers, and creation of affordable recycle plants that make reused plastic profitable. Each step of the product’s life cycle should be clearly labeled on websites, advertising, and the product itself.
For a long time, Americans have had little incentive to consume less. It’s inexpensive to buy products, and it’s even cheaper to throw them away at the end of their short lives. But the costs of all this garbage are growing, especially now that bottles and papers that were once recycled are now ending up in the trash.
We all need to consume less, trade, share, reuse, and “go paperless” as much as possible. Plastics will probably not be replaced any time soon for media and commercial use, but as consumers we can make small but determined step to say goodbye to plastic in our households and start the “trickle up effect.”
REFERENCES
“China Has Stopped Accepting Our Trash.” Mar 2019.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/china-has-stopped-accepting-our-trash/584131/
“Did You Know That Cellophane Is Biodegradable?” 20 Mar 2020
https://info.primepac.co.nz/blog/did-you-know-that-cellophane-is-biodegradable
“Federal Bill Seeks to Make Companies Responsible for Plastic Waste.” 10 Feb 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/10/business/recycling-law.html
“How Green are Tetrapak Food Cartons?” 19 Jan 2019
https://theecologist.org/2010/jan/19/how-green-are-tetrapak-food-cartons
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