Forum: Plastics are inescapable; how do we manage that future?
Published 1:30 am Saturday, August 24, 2024
By Stuart Heady / Herald Forum
I took a tour of the remodeled Waste Management recycling plant in Woodinville recently. Fast-moving automation produces 2,000-pound bales of material for remanufacturing.
The $40 million worth of machinery is impressive. But:
After 50 years of thinking about recycling and the whole sustainability and environmental context, I wonder if our large automated factories for recycling aren’t mesmerizing and distracting us from what is most important.
We need to renew our hope that we can change the world.
We need to not forget that it was people responding to the first Earth Day in 1970 and the publication of “Limits to Growth” in 1973, that were the original pioneer voices for recycling. Corporate entities had to be induced with the first efforts to offer municipal budgets and homeowners as utility ratepayers. Year after year it was obviously not an idea that corporate waste haulers originally were interested in.
The purpose is still the same. We need to quit putting plastics and other pollutants into our oceans, streams or landfills. Period.
Recyclers have attracted enough to the profit potential of remanufacturing materials that they have invested millions of dollars into processing plants. That is wonderful progress, but if we are going to address the planetary scale of the real problem, we have to look at it honestly and ramp up.
Plastics are rejected by the recyclers because it is simply not deemed cost effective to do the research and development into the chemistry needed to break down the plastics that still need to be recycled rather than put in landfills. Medical plastics. Grocery store packaging. Retail department store packaging. Products like toys could last longer than any artifact from King Tut’s tomb.
Plastic manufacturers should be encouraged more by the public and elected leaders to partner with grocery retailers and recyclers to push the envelope of what is possible. The activist principle is that what is possible as a goal beyond the status quo is a vision to drive toward. The corporate principle is to limit objectives to what is cost effective from a profit potential. In our economy, those two principles should not be at war. Progress comes from both, hopefully working together. The past 50 years has seen the beginning of awareness of the problem for the human race and our planet. We need to set our sights on the next fifty years.
We need to set the goal of “problem solved.” No more plastics that cannot be recycled. No more Texas-sized plastic patches out in the oceans. No more landfills filling up with waste that should not be there. No more acceptance of a status quo that should not be acceptable.
Stuart Heady lives on Camano Island.
