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A Million Bottles a Minute: World's Plastic Binge 'As Dangerous as Climate Change' (theguardian.com)
Should you ever travel to one of the many uninhibited islands that dot the most remote reaches of Earth's oceans, chances are you'll find plastic bottles littering the shore. The Guardian reports: A million plastic bottles are bought around the world every minute and the number will jump another 20 percent by 2021, creating an environmental crisis some campaigners predict will be as serious as climate change. New figures obtained by the Guardian reveal the surge in usage of plastic bottles, more than half a trillion of which will be sold annually by the end of the decade. The demand, equivalent to about 20,000 bottles being bought every second, is driven by an apparently insatiable desire for bottled water and the spread of a western, urbanised "on the go" culture to China and the Asia Pacific region. More than 480bn plastic drinking bottles were sold in 2016 across the world, up from about 300bn a decade ago. If placed end to end, they would extend more than halfway to the sun. By 2021 this will increase to 583.3bn, according to the most up-to-date estimates from Euromonitor International's global packaging trends report. Most plastic bottles used for soft drinks and water are made from polyethylene terephthalate (Pet), which is highly recyclable. But as their use soars across the globe, efforts to collect and recycle the bottles to keep them from polluting the oceans, are failing to keep up.
They fit in my cupholders and they are the cheapest way to buy spring water, assuming you get them on sale. I bought two flats of bottles for $3 and then they went down and I bought two more for $2 each.
I do bring them home and put them into the recycling bin, so to me the solution is to make that work. But I'd be equally happy to pay a few cents more per bottle to get compostable ones.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm pretty sure that some seemingly smart person will propose one day to release bacteria into the oceans that can digest plastic and eat it. Just that person will cause us more trouble than we ever wanted. The reason we use plastic is because it can't be digested by bacteria. If we teach bacteria how to do it efficiently we'll get the bill sooner or later by not being able to continue to use plastic for most of its purposes, like containing food, or to keep the bacteria out from medical equipment (non septic stuff is always packaged inside plastic, that's not for the cool looks), etc.
Give them a return/recycle value that makes it worthwhile for somebody to pick them out of the trash and turn them in to a recycling site
We live in the over-packaged world - everything that is sold and used comes with packaging that often eclipses the amount of material (and labor) for the product itself. This problem will not solve itself, unfortunately.
FWIW, me and my family have not bought any bottled drinks in at least 10 years. Refillable bottle it is - much cheaper too.
That's great you can recycle them. Just like aluminum cans there's no reason not to do it. Of course the problem is made to seem that no one does, but clearly people do recycle. Hence the scare quotes, large numbers, and references like halfway to the sun. 500 billion bottles sounds large but that's less than 100 per person per year. Or one every three days. Few people are going to think that's a problem.
So educate people to recycle and stop saying stupid shit like it's worse that climate change.
Overpopulation. The planet has 7.5 billion people, all of whom want to live the good life as seen in Hollywood movies and TV. One estimate has us reaching 10 billion by 2050. If there were only a billion, some plastic waste and CO2 emissions might not be such a problem. But the existing 7.5 billion folks are already destroying the biosphere, and that is today, where only a few percent (like the US, Western Europe) are enjoying the wonderful lifestyle. Good luck trying to convince all 7.5+ billion people to stop aspiring to own a car and eat steak. It will only get worse. In the long run, however, it will probably be a self-correcting problem, if you know what I mean.
The climate can change. Why can't you?
It's been pretty well proven that anyone suggesting human impact on climate change is exacerbating cows' fecal effluence. There's this thing called science; but unfortunately we don't have multiple planets on which to try to reproduce experimental results.
Let's play it safe. We can have economic growth while minimizingn environmental damage. We just have to close the current loophole that doesn't assign any value to the greatest commons we have, our mother earth.
This sounds like a lot, but in reality it is a small fraction of the oil used per hour by humanity. The average weight of a PET drink bottle is 12.7grams, so a million bottles a minute is about 12.7 metric tonnes of plastic a minute. Assuming 100% conversion efficiency from crude into PET (ie other distillates are utilised for other purposes) that is about 90 barrels a minute or 129600 barrels a day.
World crude oil usage is about 100 million barrels a day. So plastic bottles are about 0.13% of daily oil consumption. Even if we stopped using them altogether, the impact would be trivial. Also, many countries burn plastic waste to generate energy, so removing bottles as fuel will potentially cause an equivalent increase in other fossil fuel usage.
I'm not saying we shouldn't help the environment. Just pointing out that this is not going to be a panacea.
"Should you ever travel to one of the many uninhibited islands that dot the most remote reaches of Earth's oceans, chances are you'll find plastic bottles littering the shore. The Guardian reports:"
If those naughty islands would only behave properly, maybe this wouldn't be such a problem.
Do you know how valuable a plastic bottle is on a deserted island?
It lets you carry water. It lets you boil water (with care). It lets you ferment fruit juice (essential for medical as well as mental health reasons). You can make a shovel out of it.
You can make a float for fishing out of it.
These things are life savers.
So the fact that we can find plastic bottles on every deserted island is kind of a huge survival bonus.
{ / end sarcasm
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
So encourage people to pick it up.
For populated beaches setup a bunch of stands by the beaches that take plastic trash by the kilo and pay out some way. They might have to be manned to prevent people just stealing the whole unit to get the money.
With bottles you could just melt them and turn them into fresh 3D printer material.
For un-populated areas you'd need to do periodic sweeps. Then build some kind of robotic cleaning crew to catch stuff still floating. Like this one this kid invented to harvest oceanic plastic.
I have NEVER seen a cheap piece of plastic last for more than a couple years out baking in the sunshine. It disintegrates on it's own. Now admittedly some of it doesn't get as much exposure thus is slower to disappear, but it all reverts back to good ole mother earth.
Otherwise the Tennessee River which I grew up on would be totally lined with styrofoam. Seen plenty of it as a boy growing up in the 60s.
Heck, there are some woods, cedar for example, that will last longer than a plastic bottle exposed to the elements.
Caution: Contents under pressure
So, according to Trump, the Koch brothers, and most of the Republican party, not dangerous at all. Got it.
Fixed that for you.
Phew, I was worried until I read that a couple times.
I know the comparison to the seriousness of climate change is a well-intentioned try at conveying the magnitude of the problem. No matter. Be prepared for people to start freaking out on you for daring to suggest that there are global environmental issues comparable in importance to climate change. In fact, the status being a heretical climate "denier" has recently been expanded to include people like me, who never doubted for a second that climate change is real, serious, and caused by people burning stuff. My sin was apparently in the suggestion that in addition to climate change, there are other profound environmental problems we need to worry about (some exacerbated by climate change), and some of those produce more benefits per dollar invested than does the mitigation of climate change. Reducing the use of PET bottles, bringing the recycling rates higher (below 50% now), and active PET removal from ocean gyres probably belong in that category. (I say "probably" because I haven't run the numbers.) One example I feel pretty strongly about: we have to drastically reduce - and in some places entirely stop - extracting fish from the ocean until stocks recover.
I think I have very sensible and responsible views, but now I only post then anonymously because I'm sick of dealing with the outrage machine of the one-issue environmentalists who refuse to countenance the idea that we have to accept tradeoffs, and so the wise thing to do is to invest what we can in the problems where one dollar makes the biggest marginal difference.
His conclusion about the purpose of the human race? The earth made us so it could have plastic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BB0aFPXr4n4
"Over 90% of all species that have ever lived on this planet are gone..... we didn't kill them all!" lol
"Leave nature alone... it's what got us in trouble in the first place."
"The greatest arrogance of all is 'save the planet'! What? Are these people kidding me? We don't even know how to take care of ourselves yet! And we're gonna save the planet? I'm getting tired of that shit!"
"Environmentalists don't give a shit about the planet... They just want a clean place for themselves."
"There is nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine. The people are fucked!"
"The planet has been here for over 4 and half billion years, and we've only been here, what a few hundred thousand, and only in heavy industry for a little over 200 years. 200 years vs 4 and half billion, and we have the conceit to think somehow we are a threat?... The planet has been through a lot worse than us."
"The planet will shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance."
"You want to know how the planet is doing? Ask those people in Pompeii that are frozen into position from volcanic ash... how the planets doing."
"The planet will be here for a long, long, long, time after we're gone. And it will heal itself, it will cleans itself, cause that's what it does. It's a self correcting system. The air and the water will recover. The earth will be renewed. And if it's true, that plastic is not degradable, then the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm, the earth plus plastic."
Follow this up with an awesome dose of political correctness from brain droppings.
Carlin puts all this crap into a very well considered and funny perspective.
If you aren't a religious environmentalist, your bottled water isn't a sin.
That's our future descendants' power source, after the coal runs out (because nuclear power, like keeping that fork you're holding out of your eye, is simply too much for the human race to handle; and 'renewables' are putting us back at the mercy of the elements...).
Just legislate a container deposit to be paid by manufacturers. It's then built into the price that the consumer pays for it. Consumer can either throw away the deposit or claim it back at a collection depot.
In Australia, one state has been doing that for decades. People save their bottles and then cash them in at recycling depots while those less-well off make supplemental income collecting discarded containers. You get 10c per plastic or glass bottle and it even applies to cardboard milk and juice cartons.
It works really well as the recycling rate is supposedly over 90%. The government gets to keep the deposits from containers that are never recycled. When you cross the border into this state one thing that is instantly noticeable is how clean the roadsides are.
For some reason though, drink manufacturers like Coca Cola have fought tooth and nail attempts by other states to introduce similar schemes.
Those bottles can be re-used by bottling the excess CO2 in the atmosphere, solving two problems at once.
Or, at the very least, make those bottles water-soluble, so they dissolve in the ocean instead of washing up on the beaches.
So what the title is saying is that there are a bunch of overblown computer models with varying assumptions and cherry picked and massaged data to point to a plastic garbage problem? Thats a relief because be before I was concern about all of the plastic in the oceans.
obligatory post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjmtSkl53h4
The assertions of an executive running a group called "Surfers against sewage" doesn't hold much weight for me. Give me some science showing how much damage this plastic actually does. So far, I don't think it's enough to remotely compare to climate change.
That's why the climate change myth was invented in the first place. Plastic was losing its popularity, and something just had to be done about that.
I tend to rant.
Uninhabited islands.
Although, I guess uninhibited islands could very well make an "island chain" over time...
In Liberia, the blacks shit on the beach. Yep - right on the beach. As in: they go to the beach to take a shit
The beaches are filled with plastic trash and nïggershits. Like a giant kitty-litter sandbox, but for monkeys
The solution is everyone should have their own source of clean water nearby. You may not be lucky enough to have a spring, but there is very likely clean water down under the ground.
The best way to sustainable clean water is to drill your own well. The Earth's soil, when compacted and compressed by gravity through many feet of material layered on top of itself, is one of the finest water filtration mechanisms available. You can literally flush the toilet and convert your waste water back to clean water after passing it through enough layers of earth. Yes, it's that good. Better yet, the Earth never clogs and never needs a filter replacement.
Drilling a well is not necessarily all that difficult or expensive. Even a hand operated Li-Ion cordless drill and an air-lift pump (air compressor) can do the job. It's just a really deep hole in the ground after all. Once you've got your own well, you can tell the bottled water company to take a hike as you won't have any need for their bottles and plastic chemicals leached into your water anymore.
I've been living in Hawaii for 20 years. The amount of small plastic pieces on the beaches has increased tremendously in the past five years. My family went to a cove (Melekehana) two weekends ago and the beach was littered with about 50 small pieces of PVC and hard plastic per square foot (above the tide line). I sat there and picked up pieces for a couple of hours as penance. I could have trucked several truckloads of larger junk littering the beach. Each high tide brings in more. That wasn't the case just five years ago.
I have NEVER seen a cheap piece of plastic last for more than a couple years out baking in the sunshine. It disintegrates on it's own. {...} but it all reverts back to good ole mother earth.
Yes, under the sun (and lots of other environmental factors, including mechanical action) a bottle will disintegrates.
But THIS IS NOT reverting back to good old mother earth.
It is just breaking a big plastic object into finer plastic dust.
Which brings its own bunch of problems:
- this plastic dust disperse wide
- this plastic dust has a higher risk of getting ingested by marine animal
- this plastic dust also collects organic compounds more easily
- once ingested by marine animal, due to higher amount of organic compound stuck on the plastic dust, these animal accumulate more pollution.
(There a movie called "A plastic ocean" currently touring festivals that explains this better).
And thus, TFS :
Should you ever travel to one of the many uninhibited islands that dot the most remote reaches of Earth's oceans, chances are you'll find plastic bottles littering the shore.
That's actually a myth. You're nearly NEVER going to find whole intact plastic bottles in remote places because the above phenomenon.
The reality is actually much grimmer :
- with the naked eye you're not going to see much (again, artificial islands of collect plastic junks are a myth).
- but if you make lab analysis of the environment, you'll see that :
-- most local marine animals have ingested an alarming amount of plastic dust in their bodies
-- and they'll have probably concentrated some polluant at higher dose.
Otherwise the Tennessee River which I grew up on would be totally lined with styrofoam.
It is a *river*. It wont never stay lined with anything for a long time : eventually everything will get carried away by the current and broken down in smaller particles (also some substance like steel *will* degrade (to rust, etc.) while other like glass and plastic are too chemically stable. At least glass will break-down into sand (basically : glass dust)).
Once carried away by the current they will eventually find their way into the seas, then into the ocean, when they'll finally get caught into some current that will keep them in some cycle forever.
Heck, there are some woods, cedar for example, that will last longer than a plastic bottle exposed to the elements.
Actually wood isn't such a bad exemple.
But not for the reasons you think.
(No: it won't last longer than plastic bottle. It will *keep its shape* for a longer time than plastic [that's why life invented it in plants : because it's structurally sturdy]. But eventually, decomposers [bacteria, funghi, etc.] will manage to digest it. It will actually end up back into CO2)
But some eons ago that wasn't the case. It took some time between life inventing wood (somewhere in the Devonian), and bacteria coming up with a way to degrade it.
Of course all this juicy stored chemical energy was going to end-up being used as a food source for some microbes.
The same situation is happening again. We human produce tons of a nearly indestructible component (plastic) but that is still rich in stored chemical energy (the fact that you can actually burn it into CO2 is a sign).
Eventually all this untapped chemical energy is going to attract some bacteria, and in the recent couple of year, scientist have discovered some types of bacteria who have evolved a way to digest and process plastics.
Maybe in a couple of centuries (and maybe with a little bit of help by researchers) Nature will find a way to clean it self of this plastic pollution, by inventing a way to harness its stored chemical energy.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
That's a plain and simple fact.
The metaarticle is spot on. We are drowning in plastic.
The problem with plastic is, that it is also a very large third world problem, as any sense about protecting the environment often is dimished there more than it is in some parts of the first world.
We need what I would basically call a total ban on garbage, including plastic waste. Direct recycled sturdy standardised bottles can be made out of plastic, but reusing them has to become a standard. s to become a standard.Plastic wrappings should be banned entirely expect for maybe things that need to be kept sterile, like medical equipment or health and hygiene products.
If I were King, I'd push for a ban of 95% of all Garbage (wrappings) we produce including a total ban on one-way plastic bottles.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBRquiS1pis
George Carlin
So... 5x280 x 93,000,000 ~= 50,000,000,000 ft /other/ side of the sun.
A plastic bottle is about a foot high, so 500bn bottles actually gets you all the way to the sun, past it, past the Earth's orbit on the other side, and nearly out to the orbit of Jupiter on the
If we can build a tower from here past to the sun every year out of our discarded plastic bottles, why can't we build a Dyson Sphere and stop burning all these dead dinosaurs for energy?
Someone's math is definitely wrong, here. (It might be mine!)
...without in any way minimizing the seriousness of the situation, let me observe that littering is deeply embedded in human nature, and it was ever thus. The very phrase "throw it away" tells us what we need to know. If we throw it far enough to be out of sight, we feel that it's gone. I'm leading up to a quotation from Owen Wister's 1902 novel, "The Virginian." Wister visited Medicine Bow, Wyoming in 1885 and I think we can take this as accurate observation:
"Sardines were called for, and potted chicken, and devilled ham: a sophisticated nourishment, at first sight, for these sons of the sage-brush. But portable ready-made food plays of necessity a great part in the opening of a new country. These picnic pots and cans were the first of her trophies that Civilization dropped upon Wyomingâ(TM)s virgin soil. The cow-boy is now gone to worlds invisible; the wind has blown away the white ashes of his camp-fires; but the empty sardine box lies rusting over the face of the Western earth."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
It's not like we don't know where they are going. A couple floating recycling plants in the right places in ocean currents and you clean it up. Don't get me wrong, we should be recycling them prior, but as world problems go this one isn't all that high for me.
Some 90% of the plastic in the Pacific has been traced to Asia, specifically China and Viet nam. Now, the poster of this tries to lay the blame on the west claiming that our selling bottled water is to blame. This is no different than those that blame America for China's gov choosing to build new coals plants and continue using more than 85%coal for electricity. Now, the Chinese and Viet nam gov continue to throw their garbage out because it is cheaper and easier. Since both gov are communist/totalitarian, Both gov could order their citizens to clean up. But neither does.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Gonna have to go with plastic.
Mod parent up. Everyone who claimed "overpopulation" only wanted to *other people* to die off.
True believers of overpopulation should start with themselves.
Breath your CO2 into the plastic bottles and the problem is solved.
As dangerours as climate change?
Then it's obviously not a problem.
When Ocean Spray Cran Grape switched from glass to plastic, the flavor went to shit. I don't feel overpopulated, but I can tell when packaging affects flavor. Down with plastic, back to glass.
Reuse the damn bottles. Refill them with tap water - no need to buy new ones - all that fancy stuff is either just tap water or tap water with toxins such as sugar added. Why the hell pay for new bottles?
Conflating climate and pollution. It's all propaganda.
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
Good luck trying to convince all 7.5+ billion people to stop aspiring to own a car and eat steak
Do you think convincing 0.5 billion people would be any less futile?
Yes overpopulation is a problem and a multiplier. But convincing them to not use any of the many pervasive modern conveniences of the 21st century that happen to also be or cause environmental pollution (yes I'm including green house gas)... I've said this for years and i'll keep saying it because I've never failed to come to the same conclusion:
These problems need to be fixed at the source, you can't expect people to not drive it's just not possible for too many people, and likewise you can't expect people to spend so much of their time sorting trash... We need to make things that are inherantly safe to the environment, especially when it's bought by the millions everyday and is disposable (plastic containers), those need to be biodegradable.
The UK government recently forced all supermarkets to charge customers 5p for plastic bags... yet 95% of the time I still forget to take bags when I go shopping, and even if I didn't they still need replacing because they brake or get dirty, it's going to end up in the bin, so the whole "reduce" attitude (which is the same as combining this with the population problem) is pissing in the wind - or in this case more like pissing into a hurricane on Jupiter.
Yeah, that record-tying high was in Iran, but we don't like Iran, so that's good, and therefore not evidence of climate change.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
It's been years but I still cannot understand this "spring water" craze. Why that instead of refilling with tap water?
One thing to notice is that one if the first players in the still bottled water market was "Evian" - "naive" spelled backwards.
How did they convince you to buy the bottled water? How has that become the new normal? How are they taking all of us for suckers?
PET is also not as recyclable as people think. It picks up residues of the the contents and can't be properly sterilized without degrading it. So the recycled content that can be added to new bottles is only up to 25% - if that.
Polymers also get weaker each time they're reprocessed (the chains break), and carbonated drinks bottles are basically 10bar pressure vessels. So again, you don't take the chance on adding too much secondhand material.
Any contamination also affects the properties. Even 1% (such as putting the HDPE caps back on the bottles) can make a difference. Doesn't sound like much, but bear in mind the difference between mild steel and spring steel is only 1% carbon. Totally different properties.
This lack of reusability is reflected in the prices for recycled material. PET is at best half the cost of HDPE: http://www.letsrecycle.com/prices/plastics/
A lot of PET ends up being used for fiber instead of bottles. It's also very tricky to injection mold the stuff. You need really good drying equipment and the end result is often brittle. Additives (ionomers mainly) can improve this, but then you've got contamination again...
Plastics recycling is a very tricky issue.
Strong container deposit legislation pretty much solves this. E.g. "90% of all PET bottles, 63% of all aluminium cans and 86% of all glass bottles sold in Estonia were returned". Finland says "aluminium cans have a recycling rate of about 94% and PET bottles 92%".
Make the containers worth something, and amazingly they stop being thrown about.
Mexico doesn't have a plastic bottle problem because its citizens refuse to drink out of them. There's areas in why real coke with real sugar is made in Mexico, if anyone has bothered to look on the back to notice.
Where are science and politics when you need them? Is anyone even working on automatic trash sorting any more? Ultra-high-temperature plasma furnaces to safely vaporize waste into atoms/fuel and recover metals are being commercially marketed but are too expensive for towns to afford, cities don't seem interested, and commercial waste handlers have no financial incentive to change. Why are we trying to force billions of people to sort trash instead of automating waste handling and dealing better with its final resolution? Seems a ridiculous waste of life. If I was paranoid I'd think it was part of a plot to fill our lives with meaningless tasks so we don't have time to think or do anything else, though inertia seems a more likely explanation.
Climate change found to only be as dangerous as pollution by plastic.
If you expect people to believe you when you say that some problem is the worst ever, you can't then claim that another problem is also the worst ever. I'm pretty sure that nobody who thinks that this is "as bad as climate change" would be willing to compromise on some climate change measures in order to stop pollution by plastic, even though that's what you do when you think that two problems are equally bad.
I think you are putting too much stress on heredity instead of environment and whether you know it or not you are pushing a bit of a disturbing and misguided line popular in the 1920s to 1940s.
People are people, even if you think they are somehow in a lower class than you that doesn't make them a different subhuman species that is going to outbreed the social class you like. You and all those others "evolved" from ancestors with many children probably two generations or less back, so we already match your suggestion.
If I'm on the island, it's uninhibited. Even if it wasn't before. [dance club music]
are we such morons -glass bottles got returned because you got 5-15 cents back for returning them to the retailer-its called a deposit if you are too young to remember this kiddeos. Since folks wont even bend over to pick up a nickel these days make the deposit a quarter and the poor will scour the Earth for plastic bottles. Side benefit is it reduces pan handling in major cities.
If it says 'from concentrate' on the bottle, buy the concentrate. Why pay to ship the water?
Bottled 'Ice Tea'...fucking morons.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Since most bottled water is really minimally filtered if at all tap water, sell reusable insulated water containers (from cheap single wall to nice double wall, with fancy caps or plain) next to a water dispenser. Buy a token, fill your cup. Containers are reusable, no million bottles a minute. Forget your container, buy a new one and get a token with it to fill it. different size containers, different cost tokens. Even the tokens are reusable. in an area with bad water? filter it, UV it, sell it. It's now clean. and easier to clean centrally. Make sure there is some redundancy (multiple machines spare parts, redundant filtration paths). No water locally? Ship water in and store it in bulk. Bulk beats single unit containers.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
Those countries still have very high child mortality rates, especially for the very young.
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