Plastic Reduction Series: Part I of VI: Don’t Look Up? How about Don’t Look Down? The Lingering Issue of Plastic Pollution and What Some LR Students are Doing about it
Musings from the Reese Institute for Conservation of Natural Resources at Lenoir-Rhyne University — Asheville
by Ryan Barry
March 20th, 2022
Imagine one of your favorite natural places trashed — littered with single-use plastics, plastic bags, and styrofoam — bags float by, are stuck in trees, and fly through the air like kites. Now envision the pristine, fresh-flowing waters, with not a spec of litter in sight — rather than bags, you see fish flickering in the waters, beautiful green shimmering leaves and a kaleidoscope of flowering colors adorning the trees, buzzing bees, chirping birds and butterflies flying in the air — the sights, the sounds, the smells, the feeling.
At present, even in the most serene of landscapes we can’t escape the sporadic single-use styrofoam cup, food wrapper, container, or plastic bag that didn’t make its way properly to a waste or recycling bin. The 2021, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, Netflix climate change satire, Don’t Look Up has become a controversial and talked about movie, at times sparking debate around humankind’s lax response to climate change. Perhaps a fitting title for a sequel is “Don’t Look Down: Revenge of the Single-use Plastics”. Regardless of your perspective of the movie, it seems we should all be able to agree that as a society and humankind we need to live more mindfully, consciously and in-tune with ways that regenerate rather than erode the world which we inhabit.
Efforts around the globe in regions, countries, states, cities and local-settings combine in aggregate to make a difference. Movement to more sustainable ways of life will call for efforts at all levels of society. Several LR Sustainability Studies students and alumni are striving to play their part through plastic remediation and reduction endeavors (stay tuned for more on these efforts in future musings).
Packaging and the materials used to move goods from one-place-to-another are part of what we know as modern life. The goods we consume are packaged, foods and drinks we consume use packaging, and the bags and boxes that carry those goods from place-to-place are packaging. The ability to pack things is a necessary part of contemporary life. Packaging is often produced to be convenient, versatile, light-weight, cheap, durable, and easily disposable. The list of positive attributes makes it understandable why packaging modalities, such as plastic bags and styrofoam (also known as polystyrene), have become ubiquitous in our daily lives. Further, the current packaging modalities fit well within the fast-paced, do-more-with-less-time, mindset-of-modernity.
In this scenario, short-term convenience and low-cost spawns negative externalities in the form of environmental issues, societal burden, and future societal costs. Styrene (the building block of styrofoam) is a known carcinogen, a substance capable of causing cancer in living tissue. The EPA and World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer characterize styrene as a threat to human health. The very material building-blocks that create the properties producing styrofoam’s usefulness as a vessel to keep food or drink warm can create toxicity leakage into that food and drink. When hot water, tea, coffee, soup and other foods or liquids are placed in styrofoam containers the toxic styrene leaches into the food and beverage. We understand the externalities and negative impacts on the environment and human health, have affordable substitutes, and models for reducing the use of single-use plastics, so why are we still using them? And what’s taking so long to move towards more sustainable models of packaging and consumption? We have to do better, and better faster.
As of 2017, according to the Earth Institute, in aggregate 1 trillion plastic bags are used worldwide a year. The Center for Biological Diversity suggests embodied in approximately 14 plastic bags is the equivalent of the gas required to drive one mile. Thus, with 1 trillion plastic bags one can make the 43 hour 2,900 I-40 US coast-to-coast trip from Wilmington, NC to San Francisco, CA 24.6 million times. In other words, they’d have to drive non-stop for 120,900 years or until the Year 122,922 — who knows if we’ll even calculate time in years by then.
The EPA, suggests plastic shopping bags take 1,000+ years to break down in a landfill. Styrofoam takes approximately 500 years to decompose. In 50 years, there are some 50 trillion, with a T, plastic bags that have been used. Some of those are recycled, some sent to landfills, and others escape into the living environment. The catch, a bag used for a day (probably less) will outlive 12 generations of humans assuming a Life Expectancy of 80 years. World Bank statistics pose a US Life Expectancy of just shy of 80 years, at 78.8. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address began with the never to be forgotten line of “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived of liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men [humans] are created equal.” Does our generation want to be remembered by a future generation in an address of “50 score ago, our ancestors believed in a fast-life of convenient consumption enabled by one-use throw away plastics. Those plastics still burden us today in mountains known as landfills, harming wildlife, littering our living spaces, clogging waterways, and leaching toxins into our food and water sources.” Is this the legacy our generation hopes to be remembered by?
This is Part-1 of a series-of-musings that will further explore plastic pollution, why reduction’s necessary and necessary now, and how endeavors by both current LR students and LR alumni are contributing to plastics reduction and remediation. Efforts are underway aiming to tackle challenges posed by single-use plastics that are increasingly understood as problematic and damaging.