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posted by martyb on Thursday April 11 2019, @12:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the Reduce-Reuse-Recycle dept.

The National Geographic

Nairobi, KenyaIt didn’t take long after the recent United Nations environmental assembly in Kenya ended for environmentalists to sharply rebuke the United States for allegedly derailing global ambitions to prevent plastic debris from flowing into the oceans.

“The tyranny of the minority,” their statement declared as environmentalists denounced the Americans for what they said was slowing progress on marine plastics by diluting a resolution calling for phasing out single-use plastic by 2025 and blocking an effort to craft a legally binding treaty on plastic debris.
...
“I would not say the U.S. is making itself irrelevant,” says David Azoulay, a Geneva-based lawyer for the Center for International Environmental Law, who observed the negotiations. “But it is true that the U.S. is setting itself further apart, as it did with the withdrawal from the Paris accord, from addressing the critical challenges of our generation. The whole world is addressing the plastic challenge at its roots. The EU is doing it, India is doing it. The world is moving forward.”

The Americans sought to define marine debris as an issue solved exclusively by waste management, said Hugo-Maria Schally, the European Union’s lead negotiator on marine plastics, in an interview, while “virtually everybody else in the room was focused on the idea that there is a problem with production and the use of single-use plastic.”
...
One reason other nations are also seeking reductions in single-use plastics is the growing unease that even creation of the most comprehensive waste disposal systems may not be enough to keep up with the accelerating pace of plastics manufacturing. The plastics industry has grown so rapidly that half the plastic on Earth has been made since 2005, and production is expected to double in the next two decades. Disposable plastic products account for 40 percent of that production and are largely blamed for the plastic mess that’s been made of the seas.
...

So far, 127 countries have adopted regulations regarding plastic bags, according to UN tallies as of July 2018. Twenty-seven countries have adopted bans on other single-use products, including plates, cups, cutlery, or straws.

India, home to 1.3 billion people and the world’s second most-populated nation, continues preparations to abolish all single-use plastic by 2022 in a plan announced last year that may be the world’s most ambitious undertaking.

See also the Flipflopi dhow

Ben Morison’s epiphany came early one morning as he set out for a swim on Kenya’s Indian Ocean coast. The Kenyan tour operator counted 13 pieces of plastic, including bottles and flip flops, as he walked to the sea. With a jolt, he realized how degraded the coastline he loved – and marketed as a dream destination – had become. He had to act.

“It’s all too easy to look to the left or the right and wait for somebody else to do something but I thought, ‘What can I do that could help bring this to light, and be fun and cheerful?’,” he says.

The answer became the Flipflopi project: an ambitious plan to build a traditional dhow from recycled plastic and sail it along the East African coast to spread the message that our reliance on single-use plastics is wasteful and destructive.
...
The Flipflopi is the latest chapter in Kenya’s push to become a global leader in dealing with plastic pollution. In August 2017, the country introduced the world’s toughest ban on plastic bags with anyone producing, selling or using a plastic bag risking imprisonment of up to four years or fines of $40,000.

The Kenyan ban has inspired other African countries – including Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi and South Sudan – to consider following suit. Rwanda already banned plastic bags in 2008.


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11 2019, @01:05AM (7 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11 2019, @01:05AM (#827701)

    There simply is no way to get on top of our plastic problem without creating less of it in the first place.
    EVERYTHING is now made of non-biodegradable plastic -AND- more disposable plastic packaging and trinkets are being created!
    I have seen in my lifetime how nothing is made of paper, cellophane, wood, or steel anymore, but if it is, it is coated in some plastic substance.
    We are drowning in our own trash. BTW, plastic recycling is a bad joke, so that is not a real answer.

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  • (Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11 2019, @01:10AM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11 2019, @01:10AM (#827704)

    We should landfill it all, I got an incling we will run out of petrol to make the plastic before we run out of landfill space. Once that happens people will dig up the plastic dumps to turn the old plastic back into petrol.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11 2019, @01:41AM (3 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11 2019, @01:41AM (#827720)

      That is not interesting, that is massively dystopian!!! No one would convert plastics to fuel, the future is electric. Plastics would be converted to other plastics or their byproducts, y'know the actually useful molecules without great replacements?

      The only reason electric motors haven't replaced gasoline is the energy storage issue. In a dystopian future where humans are mining dumps for residual plastics I highly doubt they'll be worried about getting 300 miles out of a tank of gas vs. 100 miles from their rechargeable batteries. Fingers crossed we might even find battery chemistry that exceeds gasoline's energy density.

      This comes to mind https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J7Fq1RnLkU [youtube.com]

      • (Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday April 11 2019, @05:41AM

        by anubi (2828) on Thursday April 11 2019, @05:41AM (#827776) Journal

        Improved technology may well make reclaiming the stuff to make construction material.

        At least, in a landfill, the stuff will be concentrated in a small place and make mining it back easier.

        Thinking of plastic lumber for outdoor usage.

        Now, if we could standardize on a specific plastic designed for reuse to make one-use items from.

        --
        "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 11 2019, @01:44PM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 11 2019, @01:44PM (#827911) Journal

        That is not interesting, that is massively dystopian!!!

        What's dystopian about it?

        No one would convert plastics to fuel, the future is electric.

        Unless, of course, hydrocarbons from non-fossil fuel sources turn out to a better choice.

        In a dystopian future where humans are mining dumps for residual plastics I highly doubt they'll be worried about getting 300 miles out of a tank of gas vs. 100 miles from their rechargeable batteries.

        I doubt you're even close to being right on that one.

        Fingers crossed we might even find battery chemistry that exceeds gasoline's energy density.

        I guess so. It's not like billions of dollars in research dollars worked any better at that.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11 2019, @05:54PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11 2019, @05:54PM (#828143)

        storage...or production. if the car could create fuel from the air or increase solar efficiency then you wouldn't need to store any or much.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Thursday April 11 2019, @04:42PM (1 child)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 11 2019, @04:42PM (#828102) Journal

    Wrong. Don't ban single use plastics, require that they be biodegradable. This can be tricky for some applications, e.g. the liners of metal cans of food that isn't dry, so it may require some development, but certainly for plastics that don't need to handle extended submersion you can replace them with biodegradable alternatives. For others, perhaps something that only dissolves in an acid or basic liquid would suffice. (That, of course, would be two different plastics for two different uses.) Or perhaps something that was only soluble in oil or alcohol.

    And glass could see much wider uses in a number of areas where plastic is currently used.

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11 2019, @10:16PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11 2019, @10:16PM (#828317)

      Don't know why you'd expect anything else to.