PLASTIC POLICY!! The Waste Offset Solution. Can I get your attention?

Thesis:
The threat of bans and regulatory EPR expenses passed to Petrochemical Companies can be bargained to improve ocean plastic outcomes if the Industry is allowed to "offset" plastic sales (e.g. plastic bags, straws, scrap exports) by paying very low wage countries to pick up plastic litter before seasonal rain washes gutters and canals into the sea.
photo of city of Douala urban canal by Dr. Asi Quiggle, U of Cameroun Yaounde


Every day I see new proposals to ban plastic bags, ban plastic straws, tax plastic packaging... efforts for which this blog re-coined the phrase "grasping at straws" a few years ago. 

Here's a few recent articles about the heated discussion of "single use" plastic packaging. Most of it is bereft of science (food spoilage and transportation carbon reduced by film plastic for example), or mis-uses the science (9% of plastics ever made was recycled - but numerator includes durables like underground plastic pipe) to rile up legislators to buy us moral licensing with multi-billion dollar policy schemes intended to interfere with the free market, too often the "first solution" to problems which are associated with poverty, not corporate greed.


The last article explicitly links the ban on single use plastic at places like Wyoming's Yellowstone Park and Yosemite in the Sierra Nevada Mountains as a solution to the "ocean plastic" problem (World Ocean's Day). That seems like a geography puzzle that even Memorial University (@Rubbishmaker) could not solve.

First, the good news about the growing problem of ocean bound single use plastic packaging.

  • There's a real solution to ocean plastic pollution. 
  • It's easy and affordable.
  • Implementing it is a direct benefit to the poorest people in emerging markets.
  • It's easily accounted for.
I'm speaking of course about the so called "Fair Trade Recycling Offset" program, which I first proposed in 2014. We want to update you in the coming weeks on the enormous and impressive dividends of the $1500 pilot in Cameroon*.

Look at this tweet from @PierrePlastic of Douala, Cameroun.

And see the offset pilot in Action (photo by Dr. Asi Quiggle, U of Cameroon)



The earliest use of the "offset" concept - using fairly traded exports to fund cleanup of actual messes - appeared in a 2008 blog. That blog was all about electronic sales, supply and demand, and ethical dilemma or a "war on reuse".  


E-Scrap Traffic:  Why Good USA Recyclers Should Increase Exports


I've tried to promote the idea more recently via appeals to some of the smartest people I've met in my recycling career - hours spent with Eric Harris, Leo Roy, Joe Clayton, Wilfred Mbah - walking them through the opportunity to pay people willing to work for $3 per day to collect and properly dispose of sharply increasing volumes of "single use" plastic containers in Emerging Markets. When a per capita income is under $1k per year, there isn't much plastic waste. But a nation's per capita income grows, say to between $3k per person per year and $9k per person per year, the consumption of plastic wildly outgrows the nation's sanitation capacity. Insourcing the cost of collecting incrementally small increases in plastic diversion goals from wealth nations is a promising solution.


White Environmentalist Ptolemy Frame:

The problem is that wealthy countries focus on themselves, not the globe. The pride and moral licensing is valued by City Recycling Coordinators. If they can get $1M from The (Plastic) Recycling Partnership (mostly paid for by plastic packaging, even if it's not solely focused on "circularity" of plastic), they'd rather use it to increase the City's recycling rate from 32% to 33% than to quadruple the diversion in Lagos, Jakarta, Mumbai, or other rapidly emerging market ocean-facing cities with monsoon seasons.

To promote their grant application, bag and straw bans, bans on exports of HDPE plastic bottles, self-referencing Recycling Policy "environmentalists" will far too often use false arguments to get the policy proposal across the line.

- offer it as a solution to growing ocean plastics
- claim plastic recycling is a scam
- claim that plastic in the ocean or at "third world" landfills came from their cities' recycling programs

Now I'm not happy to be in the position of being a gadfly to the USA and European environmental communities. When I sent brief testimony (via Facebook) to my Vermont Legislator prior to the Vermont plastic bag ban, he publicly referred to me as an "Iconoclast" without responding to a single fact or question I'd put forward.  Basel Action Network regularly tells reporters I am "lying through my teeth". 

Meanwhile, for a mere $1500 World Reuse Repair and Recycling Association (@WR3A) has enlisted a dozen university students and professors in Cameroon to study the cost of getting the waste plastic (photo of Douala canal at top) to Cameroonian recyclers like Dr. Quiggle Asi (U of Yaounde), Lucian Yopa (WasteAid) and 
pierre kamsouloum

"INDUSTRY, AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO BANNING 10,000 TONS OF PLASTIC STRAW/BAG SALES, WE PROPOSE YOU DIVERT A SMALL PORTION OF THOSE SALES TO LITTER COLLECTION AT THE ACTUAL SOURCE OF OCEAN PLASTIC"


#ownGOALS 

My philosophy is based on sports. I'm totally pro-environment team. My whole life and career is devoted to species preservation and habitat diversity. Decreasing the mining and drilling and extraction is the most critical tactic, reducing virgin raw material subsidies or mandating source reduction in a free market economy is a lot harder than decreasing the cost of recycling (the only alternative, other than source reduction). But I am frustrated by own-goals, by my team members throwing the ball away, and pretending we scored a goal which was clearly a huge miss is just Ptolemy Science (the Greek astronomer who designed a model explaining how the sun revolves around the Earth, with all kinds of zig zags among stars and planets that went away when Copernicus said Ptolemy was wrong).

The noise and confusion about the polymer recycling industry is growing. It reminds me of the din of war against so-called "e-waste exports" twenty years ago. The anecdotes and photos of children at junkyards in "third world nations" were used in 2002 to launch a cringeworthy "Project Eden" to arrest Tech Sector professionals who reused affordable working and repairable "electively upgraded" devices from wealthy countries. Africa today has an estimated 170,000 mobile phone towers, but only enough new phones sold as of 2010 to account for maybe six or seven of them...

Film major Jim Puckett, is a pleasant guy to chat with. Unfortunately, he's been caught repeatedly lying (about me, personally, and about valedictorians around the world, a denier of "geeks of color", a white environmentalist). His organization, Basel Action Network, did enormous damage to reuse and recycling markets. BAN's primarily responsible for the 80% export lie that led California to ruin a few billion dollars in display devices via SB20. His executives work for him for a few years and then quit rather than cover up.

Now he's championing the war on plastics recycling. Here is an update on all the plastics statistics, confusion, legislation, and white environmental supremist assumptions about ocean plastic. However, there's a BIG DIFFERENCE between the #EwasteHoax and the #plasticocean misdiagnosis...

The e-waste hoax targeted the SECONDARY REUSE AND REPAIR MARKET. Most of BAN's funds, naturally, came from Planned Obsolescence driven Tech Industry, the same lobbyist groups opposing the Right to Repair. The OEMs propped BAN up, gave Puckett credibility, and supported raising the drawbridge against the "Good Enough Market" of secondhand electronics.

But plastic doesn't have that planned obsolescence, big shred, enemy-of-my-competitor-is-my-charity industrial complex. When BAN attacks plastic recycling, he's attacking a trillion-dollar petrochemical industry which has nothing to gain from his exaggerations.



Adam Minter Bloomberg

Fair Trade Recycling Offsets

WasteAid

@PierrePlastic

Biden Yosemite plastics

Offsets.

You all should be able to write this blog for me, based on my notes above.

 *(Cameroon was my Peace Corps home 1984-86, see 1985 documentary "Blind Men and the Elephant" if you have way too much time and interest in the blog backstory). Two 30 second snippets featuring 23 year old Robin Ingenthron, below.


https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkx5fK_WChmBsCZyS8i9Xt_PcTsXCuq5kXD

https://www.youtube.com/clip/Ugkx5NOCa4OtMKDnVmsOPo5HCUcpjavGOrJy





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