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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.
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“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.”
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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.
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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.
(Score: 4, Informative) by HiThere on Thursday April 11 2019, @04:56PM (2 children)
There do exist plastic eating bacteria, but they are **SLOW**, and quite particular about just which plastics they will eat.
The reason for this is part of the use-case of plastic: plastics aren't soluble in water. So bacteria can only get at a very small fraction of the matter. Also they are reported to be a bit picky about just where they live. It would probably be possible to build digesters where finely shredded plastic was dumped and then composted in an appropriate environment for a number of years, but I don't think a landfill would qualify, and one one need to seal the thing against leaks, and probably adjust the pH, humidity, and temperature. I doubt that it would be profitable unless highly subsidized.
A better answer is biodegradable plastics, which *do* exist. And additional variants can be developed to handle specific environments. (I believe that most of the current ones are slowly water soluble, but it could certainly be possible to develop variants that are soluble in aqueous acid [e.g., a mixture of vinegar and water] or aqueous base [e.g. household ammonia], and probably variants soluble in alcohol and oil would also be useful.
The current plastics were developed to use up wastes from coal and oil refining, and they do a good job of that. This made them cheap to make, because the raw material was specific kinds of industrial waste. The biodegradable plastics so far can't be made from the same raw material, but require agricultural waste as their starting material. (Corn stalks was the source of one variety I heard of.) This makes them inherently more expensive as long as we're using lots of refined oil and coal. But they *do* exist.
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, @10:26PM (1 child)
PLA biodegrades in seawater in about 6 months
It is manufactured from fermenting sugar, typically from corn, because of cost and availability.
Corn industry is huge consumer of fertilizer, herbicide, and insecticide. Ignoring the run-off and such, these are not green to manufacture either.
Then there is the transportation pollution generated by shipping everything around.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday April 12 2019, @03:51AM
Yes, but I believe that the plastic is made out of corn wastes, and the corn grain is still used for...well, whatever it would have been used for. But the reason this is the source material is that it's cheap. Sawdust would be more difficult to process, lawn clippings more difficult to collect, etc.
When you're using a waste material of something that would have been made anyway it's not fair to count all, or even most, of the costs, whether environmental or other, against it. They could even use algae as the source material, but then you *would* need to count all the costs against it, because then you wouldn't have been using an agricultural waste, but rather an agricultural product. (The algae wouldn't otherwise have been grown.)
OTOH, I'm remembering back to an article from around a decade ago, and I'm not sure the plastic being described was this "PLA" you mention.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.