America’s plastic problem swept under the carpet
More than a million tonnes a year of America’s plastic rubbish is ending up in places such as oceans and roadways, according to a new study.
In 2016 – the last year enough data was available, and before several countries cracked down on imports of American waste – the US generated 42 million tonnes of plastic waste, by far the most in the world.
Between 2.7 and 5.3 per cent of that was mismanaged – not burned, put in landfills or otherwise disposed of properly, according to the study, published in the journal Science Advances.
Between 1.1 million and 2.2 million tonnes of plastic waste generated in the US was dropped on land, rivers, lakes and oceans as litter, illegally dumped, or shipped abroad and then not properly disposed of, the study found.
If you took nearly 2.2 million tonnes of mismanaged plastic waste and dumped it on the White House lawn, ‘‘ it would pile as high as the Empire State Building’’, said study co-author Jenna
Jambeck, an environmental engineering professor at the University of Georgia.
Previous studies hadn’t put the US among the 10 worst offending nations for plastic waste in oceans – because the US Environmental Protection Agency only tracks what goes into official parts of the waste stream, such as landfills and recycling centres.
Some of the researchers from previous studies decided to look deeper – and found so much improperly handled plastic waste that the US ranks as high as the third-worst ocean plastic polluter.
The study estimated that 510,000 to 1.5 million tonnes of US plastic waste went into the oceans each year.
‘‘We are facing a global crisis of far too much plastic waste,’’ said study lead author Kara Lavender Law, an oceanography professor at the Sea Education Association in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
A large but hard to quantify part of the problem involved the 51 per cent of US plastic waste shipped abroad for recycling to countries that routinely mismanaged waste, Law said.
‘‘ It’s getting put on a ship that’s sailing most of the way around the world for somebody to unpack it and pick through it and cut labels off it in hopes that some portion of that material will be turned into [ plastic] pellets and into a children’s toy or whatever.’’
China and other countries have become more restrictive about taking US waste, and more plastic is ending up in American landfills.
‘‘US exports of plastic waste have declined dramatically – nearly 70 per cent – since their peak in 2016,’’ said Joshua Baca, vice-president for plastics at the industry group American Chemistry Council.
Baca said the industry was spending billions of dollars trying to fix the problem, with modern recycling technology and new business models to reduce waste, while calling for mandatory recycled content standards for new products and packaging.