Related problems of trees, plastics, and pollution

ENVIRONMENTAL groups Stand. earth and Natural Resources Defense Council came out last week with a report that Americans use more toilet paper than any other nation today. The paper is made from wood pulp, mostly produced by logging companies in old forests in Canada. Logging companies there are cutting down more than 405,000 hectares of trees every year.

Much earlier, in September, 2017, another environmental group, Greenpeace, reported that China, Indonesia, and the Philippines are the world’s three worst plastic polluters of the world’s oceans. They are the foremost consumers of products like softdrinks straws, bottlecaps and labels, instant coffee sachets, and grocery bags. Three US companies were named as the world’s foremost producers of products packed in cheap, disposable plastic.

These two reports may seem unrelated at first glance. But they are intimately related to each other. They are two faces of the same problem of worldwide pollution, in relation to fast-disappearing natural resources and worsening climate change.

In the ongoing campaign to cut down on the use of single-use plastics such as straws, the proposed alternative is to use wooden stirrers. Instead of plastic bags, paper and cardboard boxes. Instead of plastic walls for buildings, wooden panels. This would cut down on the use of plastics and, consequently, the plastic pollution in the world’s oceans.

But it would also mean more trees would need to be cut down to produce the wooden softdrinks stirrers, paper bags, cardboard boxes, and wooden walls for buildings – more trees than the thousands now being destroyed by loggers in Canada.

Plastics, which are made mostly from oil and other minerals in the earth, have been an excellent substitute for wood and paper products but the problem is that they are not biodegradable. They do not rot, they do not dissolve, they do not return to the earth like paper and other products made from trees. After they have been used they are dumped in landfills, there to remain for hundreds of years. Worse, they are swept out to sea where they are often consumed by ocean creatures mistaking them for food and shortly afterwards dying from them in their stomachs.

One solution, as some scientists see it, is to come up with plastics that are biodegradable. They could then quickly return to earth after their use, to become basic building blocks for trees and other natural resources. There could be other ways to make plastics less of a threat to the environment so we can continue to use them, to meet the needs of the world’s fast-growing population, saving our trees from being cut down to make products the world needs, like toilet paper.