Plastic Waste Is A Biproduct - of Growing World Consumer Affluence (and Petrol Refinement)

Based on Twitter, Quora, Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as a growing number of press releases issued by Basel Action Network (the worst run NGO on the planet, manufacturing disinformation and reckless ad hominem and warrantless accusations and collateral damage for 2 decades), the plastic straw in the turtle's nose continues to churn affluent (#wguilt) attention.

This National Geographic Ocean Plastic Graphic is the best graphic presentation of an environmental problem since EWaste Republic.

The problem of ocean plastics is real.  It is so serious that we cannot afford to waste time on false causalities.  There is a cognitive dissonance growing in the environmentally activist community.  We don't want our heart surgeons to be displaying emotional breakdowns. Virtually ZERO of the Ocean Plastics Waste can be attributed to Western recycling programs, and virtually NOTHING can be accomplished by ceasing production of plastic at the source.

1) Plastic is itself, by and large, a recycled byproduct of gasoline refining.  When petroleum is pumped from the ground and refined to produce diesel or petrol or kerosene, a fatty polymer rich byproduct is produced. Plastic was a great invention to reduce the need to burn or dump that byproduct.

2) If Plastic was eliminated, it might give us a warm feeling that won't last long (like peeing our own pants). The energy needed to transport waste from food spoilage or metals and glass manufactured to replace it, and the weight of the new packaging, would create greater demand for fuel derived from petroleum.  The more cheese you make, the more whey you produce, the more milk you make, the more butter fat you produce, the more gasoline you make, the more polymers you produce. Banning whey won't spare any heifers. 

3) Ocean Plastic waste is, according to the very interesting internet presentation by National Geographic, produced by nations which are growing the most quickly in per capita income. As Africans and Asians have eliminated starvation, disease, and poverty over the past 50 years, they can afford the same stuff (gasoline engines and packaged water and packaged food) that "wealthy" countries have been buying.

If you want to see how people live in every country on earth, in photos and film, taken by smart phone (or "gentleman's C", good enough market phone), keep visiting the Gapminder Dollar Street Project.  Incremmentally, you see how poverty is changing. Steadily, homes are improving. Steadily, malnutrition is associated with too many calories rather than famine we read about in past decades.

There's a cynical aspect to the charitable industrial complex driven industry, field by wringing guilt out of privileged people.  That's fine, I'm all for donating to save the planet, my whole career has been oriented around conservation for future generations since I was a teenager.

But misdiagnosis and blaming the wrong people is all the more cynical and wrong when it siphons off our wealthy best intentions to pursue crappy ideas. Not a dime to collateral damage!

The circular economy is going to happen when rapidly emerging economies in Asia and Africa and the Global South get over the hump of adolescent growth and adapt solid waste management and litter control.

Solid waste management (landfilling, incineration, organic composting, scrap collection and sorting) has been a bed of fraternal squabbling in wealthy nations for about 30 years. Recyclers are so busy decrying other forms of waste management ("Zero Waste!") that we seem to have forgotten how important well engineered lined landfills and waste-to-energy facilities - and yes, recycling and composting facilities - were to greening our own rivers.

The rivers choked with plastic waste in Asia, particularly, are a stormwater runoff problem which can be best addressed by litter collection.  Litter collection is aided by things like deposits and bottle bills, and I am all for those worldwide. But bottle laws were not initially designed for recycling per se, even though they did lead to greater recycling (and to the invention of post-consumer plastic recycling, when PETE soda containers were finally accumulated in critical mass to experiment on, thanks to container redemption and baling).

It's gotten really dull to be critical all the time, but that's what John Brown was - he was critical of slavery abolitionists who were pretending to make a difference but were NOT making a scat of difference. Critical thinking is necessary, and critical thinking needs dialectic, and dialecting should be immediately focused on idiotic messages like your curbside plastic recycling contents are being dumped in the ocean.

That's evil.  And people lying about solutions and raising money to produce false claims are going to be the focus of future academics and future generations of environmentalists. I cannot stand the story about the champions of leaded gasoline, of mercury based laxatives, and other "solutions" to false and anecdotal causes. 

If you are shy to call out evil because they are wearing your environmentalist uniform in a Recycling v. Landfill or Recycling v. Litter scrimmage game, you need to grow up and start to promote actual economic systems - such as litter deposits, plastic litter "offsets", and pay emerging markets per ton of plastic they remove from the roads before monsoon stormwater runoff brings it to the sea.

Thank you, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, for providing facts that we can use to build solutions around.