Sometimes
I worry about the strangest things. Like yesterday I worried whether the
plastic drink cup I saw tossed from a car window will end up in the ocean.
It’s
entirely possible. The wind blows it into a creek that flows into a lake
drained by a river that goes to Lake Ontario, into the St. Lawrence River and
eventually out to the Atlantic Ocean. Plastic never decomposes completely, so
that cup has plenty of time to make the journey.
If
it does, it will join the estimated10 million tons of plastic entering the
oceans every year. The scientific journal PLOS ONE has published a study that
estimates there now are 270,000 tons of plastic floating on the oceans. Some of
these floating carpets are dense enough to block sunlight from entering the
water.
All
that plastic has an impact on wildlife. A University of British Columbia study
found that 93 percent of beached northern fulmars had plastic in their bellies.
Fulmars are migratory seabirds related to the albatross.
Ocean
plastic pollution is estimated to kill or injure more than 260 species around
the world.
A
good chunk of ocean plastic debris is plastic bags. We Canadians use nine to 15
billion plastic bags a year, says the environmental group Greener Footprints. That
is enough plastic bags to encircle the earth 55 times. (Folks in the U.S. use
an estimated 100 billion plastic bags every year.)
Plastics
are a helpful and important part of life today. They are in almost everything
that we use but the problem is that, like many other things, we overuse them.
Plastic
bags are an example. Various sources estimate the world uses up to one trillion
plastic bags a year, or roughly one million every minute. Only one in every 200
of those bags gets recycled.
There
is so much concern about plastic bags damaging the environment that user
fees,
restrictive laws and outright bans are being put in place. A variety of
Canadian cities have, or are considering, measures to control plastic bag use.
Some
African nations have placed controls or outright bans on plastic bags. Kenya
has passed laws under which anyone selling or importing plastic bags can get up
to four years in prison.
Rwanda
has declared plastic bags contraband. It is illegal to produce, import, use or
sell plastic bags and plastic packaging except within specific industries like
health care. Rwandan border guards say women have been caught smuggling plastic
bags – tucking them into their bras and underpants.
Plastics
are only one part, albeit a large part, of the world’s waste pollution problem.
Even all the admirable efforts being made to recycle are hitting snags. Too
often there is too much recyclable waste to recycle.
China,
the world’s largest importer of waste for recycling, has announced that it will
restrict the type of waste it imports for recycling. The Chinese import huge
amounts of waste, which they recycle for producing goods they export for sale,
or use for themselves.
The
U.S. shipped $56 billion worth of scrap to China last year, mainly plastic,
metal and paper. European Union countries send 87 per cent of all their plastic
waste to China.
The
problem is that recyclable waste often contains contaminants that must be
sorted and removed before recycling. Sorting and removing contaminants costs
time and money. China will no longer will take waste containing more than 0.5
per cent contaminants.
Experts
say it will be nearly impossible to meet the 0.5 per cent target. So the U.S. and other major waste exporters to
China will be stuck with huge amounts of waste.
The real
answer to stopping waste pollution, plastic and otherwise, will not be found
only in recycling. We all need to use less; stop our incredible overuse of
almost everything. And, focus and educate ourselves about what is happening to
our environment.
Some will
argue that using more is good for the economy. More products rolling off
conveyor belts mean more jobs and more money.
Yes, but we
all should pause and consider a quote from Edward Abbey, the American writer
and environmentalist:
"Growth
for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."
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