Approach won’t cut it
LIKE Herbie Rehder (“Build a cleaner planet”, July 14) I was horrified to read last Thursday of the staggering volume of plastic going to landfill in SA. But I don’t share his enthusiasm for the EcoBrick project as part of a realistic solution. How much “sustainable” building will it take to use up this country’s annual one billion kilos of excess plastic waste? (That’s 4 000 tons every day of the working week.)
What is the useful lifespan of EcoBricks and what do we do after that? Bury them? Most plastics don’t rot through bio-degradation because they’re indigestible to the bacteria which naturally convert organic waste into biologically useful compounds.
In the absence of UV/sunlight, those daily mega-tons of plastics will take centuries to break down. Exposed to sunlight, however, most plastics will yield to photo-degradation; but either way, they never truly disintegrate back into nature. Instead we are left with countless minute shreds (“nurdles”) – many of them toxic – eternally polluting our soil, fresh water and oceans.
Nor was I greatly encouraged by the accompanying article, “Help get plastic out of the sea”. It may well be that “Plastics SA aims to raise awareness of the… benefits of recycling” but its primary role is PR for South Africa’s polymer producers, processors and converters: the plastics industry. Their director of sustainability, Douw Steyn, well knows that the best response to the problem of plastics pollution is to “reduce, re-use, recycle”.
Recycling is, however, the last (and worst) option, to fall back on only when the other two have failed. First, we must drastically reduce overall output of oil-based thermoplastics. Secondly, we must only make re-usable goods and slash the production of short-term and one-use items. Not just shopping bags, yoghurt pots and plastic bottles, but disposable cigarette lighters, nappies, cheap cellphones and tatty electronic products.
Of course neither option is particularly attractive to the plastics industry. But it is only once these priorities have been seriously addressed that recycling will be able to make any sustainable impact on the remaining problem. The proposal that recycling alone will do much good is, quite frankly, er… rubbish. Stephen Pain Friends of the Earth Riversdale