German and Vermont Plastic Bans - Go Fund Me a Mountain

So first the headline - Germany takes the initiative to ban all single use plastics by July 2021. It's being applauded and heralded all over Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter. See coverage on ABC News this morning:

Germany bans single-use plastic straws, food containers

Germany is banning the sale of single-use plastic straws, cotton buds and food containers (AP)

Here is a better idea. Support our Fair Trade Recycling Offset plan. I've been talking about it for years, and have now set up a GoFundMe page with a goal of $25,000.  We will then pay for litter collection out of Ghana streets in the weeks before the monsoon rain washes thousands of tons of plastic litter into the ocean we all share.

(Ed. - Originally, FTR's Offset Program was launched specifically for e-waste recovery. We now see ocean-bound plastic as the main target. Our estimate is that it costs $1000 of effort to collect one additional ton of properly sorted plastics from a mature USA recycling program. By contrast the same $1000 would pay to divert ten tons of ocean-bound plastic from Africa's cities, before a monsoon washes that plastic out to sea, where it will cost $10,000 to capture the one ton again).

Vermont's plastic bags are not the problem. Voting to ban the plastic is little more than virtue signalling. Recall where ocean litter comes from.

Plastic recyclers in Tamale, Ghana

This is a big, big opportunity for the Plastics and Container Industries to make a big contribution to Keep Atlantic (and Pacific, etc) Beautiful.

The "Plastic 'Berg" (short for iceberg) in the constipated waterways of Badung, Indonesia's third largest city, was covered quite well by BBC in April 2018. The amount of plastic entering the ocean from that city alone dwarfs all the plastic in Vermont recycling bins. But American environmentalists and German environmental activists think it's about us.... Just like so many of us thought the junk TVs eventually discarded, after decades of use, in the Agbogbloshie junkyard were "about us". The circular economy isn't Ptolemy's model, even if we care more about the ocean plastic than poorer people can afford to, it's not about OUR plastic.

I recently saw a blogger claim to know for a fact that the plastic in the ocean comes from exported plastic purchased by recyclers in Asia. He was receiving all kinds of crazy kudos, likes of his post, etc. But it's hogwash. Asians don't fly to the USA to buy bales of plastic, pay to ship it across the ocean, just to dump it. But what Asians do not do that well (except in places like Singapore) is collect their own plastic litter. That's because the economies in Asia are doing a lot better, and fewer scrappers are willing to make a living collecting based on scrap value. Same in Africa... there are more KFC's going up all over the world, and more single use plastic in the hands of more people.

Thirty years ago, before I became Recycling Director for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts DEP, I researched plastic bans, plastic recycling, and deposit laws. There wasn't much science behind the ban, people were citing disappearing landfill space. But it turns out that much of the plastic is already a recycled byproduct, produced when Petroleum is made into Gasoline, etc. That's one reason there are so many types of plastic, which is why they are difficult to sort and recycle.  Here is another ABC News Story questioning the science behind plastic bag bans, etc. (February 23, 2020).

As plastic bag bans go into effect, some question the unintended consequences

In the U.S., 380 billion plastic bags and wraps are used every year.

I tried via Facebook to share my professional knowledge of the plastic bag bans with one of my favorite Vermont State congressmen, Senator Christopher Bray of Addison County. Senator Chris Bray has tried to support Good Point Recycling as much as he can, when he can (though we remain singled out by Vermont ANR for things no other electronics collector is required to do in Vermont). When Senator Bray promoted the Vermont plastic bag ban last year, I volunteered what I thought might be welcome insights from a recycling professional. Chris merely responded that I was well known as "an iconoclast" in Vermont...

I had to go look up iconoclast again to know whether to feel honored or insulted. I don't think Senator Bray really intended it as an insult, but it clearly said that my opinion and knowledge on the subject wasn't going to make a difference. And worse, it said majority isn't concerned with science. Today, the traditional meaning of Iconoclasm - tearing down of statues - may even be popular again.

Moral Licensing

By banning plastic, environmentalists will get to check a box that says they did something. The net increase in carbon from the manufacture of metal and glass containers will go up.  The byproducts of petroleum distillation will increase. More food will probably spoil, and the tons of food delivered per gallon of fuel will probably go down as well. And other unintended consequences are likely, per the second ABC News story.  As Adam Minter noted last year, sales of rolls of thicker plastic bag increased in states that ban plastic bags, an indication of how many "single use" items are used multiple times for multiple things. I've always reused my single use bags as often as I can, and with a certain number of uses I do more for the environment that I'd do with a cloth or reuseable nylon bag.

The main hope of these bans is that they will be a head fake to get the Big Plastics petrochemical industries to support Fair Trade Recycling Offsets, and perhaps even bottle / container deposits on more things than carbonated drinks. They prevailed 30 years ago in Massachusetts packaging referendum, and partly did so by supporting (somewhat) the recycling of PETE (#1) and HDPE (#2), which were over 80% of the container waste stream in our DEP waste audit analyses.

Every city with a river needs waste collected. We have to look outside our own borders. Hiring Africans, Asians and LatinXs to collect plastic garbage from the gutters is going to divert far more pollution than any tweak of German or Vermont law.