Plastic waste requires actual conservatism
Plastics Road is one of two on Dow property in Lake Jackson that is built using postconsumer waste.
Texas conservatives threw a hissy fit when Seattle and other jurisdictions banned single-use plastic straws, making me wonder if they had forgotten the root word for their movement was to conserve.
Where is the conservatism in taking natural gas, converting it into a polyethylene pellet, extruding it into a straw, shipping it to a restaurant wrapped in paper, sipping from it a single time and then dumping it in a landfill?
Did they mistake wanton waste for personal liberty? Isn’t wastefulness the antithesis of conservatism as well as the greatest sin in economics? How is such a stance defensible when the growing mass of plastic garbage is becoming too large to ignore? Even major plastic producers say we must change our behavior.
“There are no deniers out there that we have a plastics waste issue,” Jim Fitterling, the CEO of Dow Chemical, said of his industry during the annual CERAWeek conference in Houston last month. “Everybody has confronted that; everybody sees that issue and is willing to tackle it.”
Fitterling said global plastics sales topped 440 million tons last year. Most of it is not recycled, and 88 million tons end up in the ocean every year. The floating plastic gyres in the Pacific Ocean present an object lesson in how humans are littering the world, but the more pernicious problem is closer to home in the public water supply.
Almost 85 percent of tap water samples, taken from 159 different sources in fourteen countries on five continents, were contaminated with microscopic plastic fibers, according to reporting by Orb Media, an international investigative reporting center founded by my friend Molly Bingham.
Last year, her team tested more than 250 bottles from 11 leading brands of bottled water and found that 93 percent were contaminated with microplastic fibers. The health impacts are unclear because the problem is largely unstudied, but early evidence suggests significant interference in digestive processes.
More than 35 companies have joined together and raised $1.1 billion to clean up the plastic industry, Fitterling said. They plan to create a recycling ecosystem similar to what aluminum companies did in the 1970s.
The industry coalition, Alliance to End Plastics Waste, aims to eventually divert all plastic away from landfills and the ocean.
“Part of the problem is that the
entire value chain has been built as a linear value chain. You use a product, you discard it, and it goes into landfill,” he said. “How do we take waste and put a value to it so that it doesn’t go back into the environment.”
Creating sustainable, circular supply chains is something Padmini Ranganathan has worked on for 25 years. She advises companies as the global vice president for products and innovation at consulting firm SAP Ariba. She said corporate PR campaigns no longer do the trick.
“Companies are seeing they will lose on their top line revenues if they don’t make the change,” she told me. “We need to rely less on certificates and more on steps actually taken. It’s really about transparency at the end of the day.”
For consumers and investors to take the industry’s initiative seriously, Fitterling and his cohort must open every link in the value chain to public scrutiny. How clean is production, how is waste controlled, how are workers treated, how will corporations encourage recycling, and how can we verify it is happening?
Thanks to big data and machine learning, auditing is becoming much easier.
“There are so many ways in which you can track a brand’s plastic and see what is recycled,” Ranganathan said.
There are dozens of initiatives to recycle plastic if companies will only use them, she added. For example, the nonprofit Plastics for Change provides a transparent, verifiable supply chain to deliver recycled plastic from garbage pickers in emerging markets directly to company factories.
Some environmentalists argue for simply banning single-use plastics, but that is unrealistic. Metal and glass containers generate four times the greenhouse gas emissions as equivalent plastic contained, and we need single-use plastics for the medical and pharmaceutical industries.
The key change-maker, though, is the consumer, who must compromise and apply common sense. Do you need a plastic straw when a paper one will do? Do you need Styrofoam containers and thin-film bags when you can bring a reusable one from home? And they need to accept that governments should ban some plastics as a waste management best practice.
The industry is smart to develop a zero-waste policy that recycles those resources and should move expeditiously. It is the conservative thing to do.
Tomlinson writes commentary about business, economics and policy. chris.tomlinson @chron.com twitter.com/cltomlinson