Even on Earth Day, plastic isn’t evil

Fishermen are the ones destroying our oceans

I may be the most biased writer about plastic on the planet. When I was growing up, plastic was practically a sibling.

My father was an executive of Dow Chemical, then makers of dozens of kinds of plastic, including the Saran Wrap most readers have in their kitchen. When Dad saw an interesting piece of plastic, he’d reach out and reverently feel it, saying, “Hmmmmm, polypropylene,” or “I think that’s linear lowdensity polyethylene.”

Though he is long retired from the plastics-industry consulting firm he founded, his love affair continues. He wasn’t the guy who gave one word of advice to Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate, but he could have been.

As a kid, I bristled when plastics turned into environmental enemy No. 1. My dad was no planet-hater. Back then, the fear was that plastic was overrunning our landfills and we were running out of places to put trash. Those fears turned out to be overblown, and the outcry has largely died off.

This weekend, another plastic story is going to be on front pages and newscasts across the country. Earth Day’s theme is “End Plastic Pollution.” And the picture-ready poster children for the problem are giant floating trash piles in the middle of our oceans.

As the Earth Day Network puts it in its “Plastic Pollution Primer and Action Toolkit,” the problem is vast: “These huge concentrations of plastic debris cover large swaths of the ocean; the one between California and Hawaii is the size of the state of Texas. … If nothing changes in our plastic consumption habits, by 2050 there will be more plastic in the oceans than there are fish.”

The images are pretty ghastly. What is the answer this Earth Day, according to the network? “The most important step we can take to limit the amount of plastic pollution that makes its way into our oceans is to reduce the amount of plastic we consume in the first place.” The group then suggests we all audit our own plastic use and cut back on our plastic bags, straws and bottles, among other sins against nature.

But before Americans get too worked up about this latest blight on the reputation of plastics, there are a few facts about those vast piles of plastic floating in the ocean that you might not have heard:

❚ They aren’t made of plastic bags and straws; they’re mostly made of abandoned fishing equipment.

❚ The second biggest contributor wasn’t man throwing things away, but a tsunami striking Japan and sweeping all kinds of things out to sea.

❚ While thousands of tons of the plastic floating out there were thrown away, they weren’t thrown away here. Asia is home to five out of the five biggest plastic polluters.

❚ Oh, and banning things such as single-use plastic bags and straws isn’t among the best solutions to stopping the pollution of our oceans, but setting vast amounts of waste plastic on fire is. Seriously.

Don’t take my word for it.

It was the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Reports that revealed the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” in the words of National Geographic, is “mostly abandoned fishing gear” and debris from the tsunami that hit Japan in 2011.

Plastic-loving David Mastio isn’t the guy who says Asian countries are destroying the world’s oceans. The environmental activists at Ocean Crusaders point the finger at China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Sri Lanka as the countries that dump the vast majority of plastic in our oceans.

It isn’t the plastics industry that says burning old plastic for energy and getting developing countries to do a better job of putting trash in landfills are better ideas than plastic bag bans. It is the Ocean Conservancy.

It would be great to “End Plastic Pollution,” as the Earth Day folks advocate, but while we do it, let’s keep the facts straight and keep one thing in mind: “Most advances of human society over the past century have been facilitated by the use of plastics.”

I didn’t say that. The peer-reviewed scientific journal Reviews on Environmental Health did.