China and Plastic Waste

One way we consumers can intuit the out-of-balance manner in which we live in late-stage capitalism is the amount of plastic waste that we produce. As I have mentioned before, it seems to me that the each purchase is consecrated with a carapace of plastic.

No greater bounty of refuse plastic can be found than in your average takeout order. Walking to a coffee house yesterday at lunch I crossed paths with a young woman toting a billowy white pillowcase of a plastic bag holding plastic clam shells containing her meal.

The main story, "Food Delivery Apps Are Drowning China in Plastic" by Raymond Zhong and Carolyn Zhang, in yesterday's business page of The New York Times manages a twofer: 1) it sketches the importance of the growing popularity of takeout orders made by smartphone in the planet's burgeoning plastic pollution problem; and 2) it maligns China.

Zhong and Zhang are not so successful in the former. China still produces less plastic waste per capita than the United States, and, come to find out, a lot of U.S. plastic recycling was based on its ability to export it to China, something now endangered since China banned the importation of many types of plastic:

People in China still generate less plastic waste, per capita, than Americans. But researchers estimate that nearly three-quarters of China’s plastic waste ends up in inadequately managed landfills or out in the open, where it can easily make its way into the sea. More plastic enters the world’s oceans from China than from any other country. Plastic can take centuries to break down undersea.

Recyclers manage to return some of China’s plastic trash into usable form to feed the nation’s factories. The country recycles around a quarter of its plastic, government statistics show, compared with less than 10 percent in the United States.

[snip]

China is home to a quarter of all plastic waste that is dumped out in the open. Scientists estimate that the Yangtze River emptied 367,000 tons of plastic debris into the sea in 2015, more than any other river in the world, and twice the amount carried by the Ganges in India and Bangladesh. The world’s third and fourth most polluting rivers are also in China.

Takeout apps may be indirectly encouraging restaurants to use more plastic. Restaurants in China that do business through Meituan and Ele.me say they are so dependent on customer ratings that they would rather use heavier containers, or sheathe an order in an extra layer of plastic wrap, than risk a bad review because of a spill.

[snip]

This deluge of trash might not be such a big problem were China not in the middle of a monumental, if flawed, effort to fix its recycling system. Recycling has long been a gritty, unregulated affair in the country, one driven less by green virtue than by the business opportunity in extracting value out of other people’s leavings.

The government now wants a recycling industry that doesn’t spoil the environment or sicken workers. The transition hasn’t been smooth.

China recently banned many types of scrap from being imported into the country, hoping that recyclers would focus on processing domestic material instead. That killed off a lucrative business for those recyclers, and left American cities scrambling to find new dumping grounds for their cardboard and plastic. Some cities have been forced to end their recycling programs.

No doubt most neighborhoods in the U.S. will eventually be impacted by China's ban. Mine is. The silver lining here is that a domestic fix will have to be devised.

(By the way, Naked Capitalism regularly covers plastic pollution issues.)

I am the Product of Capitalism

I have a big canvas bag, like twice or maybe even thrice the size of a regular canvas tote bag. Every week or week-and-a-half I take it down chock full to the street-level recycle bin that serves the apartment building where I live. 

I can't believe how much recyclable plastic I accumulate in a week; it dwarfs by volume the glass and tin I toss into the bag, the daily newspaper I read too.

I buy a lot of berries, salad and fruit juice. All come in high-quality recyclable plastic containers. So while I might eat a healthy, organic diet, I am spewing out a load of plastic on a regular timetable.

I know intuitively that this augurs ill if not outright doom. How can one modest single person -- I only eat one full meal a day! -- produce so much plastic waste? Multiple that by billions and you have a classic case of overshoot.

And make no mistake, waste it is. Ninety-one percent of plastic is not recycled. Plastic that is recycled ends up in landfill anyway, and from there finds its way to the sea. Then you get yesterday's story, "Dead Whale Found With 88 Pounds of Plastic Inside Body in the Philippines":

A beached whale found in the Philippines on Saturday died with 88 pounds of plastic trash inside its body, an unusually large amount even by the grim standards of what is a common threat to marine wildlife.

The 1,100-pound whale, measuring 15 feet long, was found in the town of Mabini with more than 40 pounds of plastic bags inside its stomach, along with a variety of other disposable plastic products.

[snip]

The whale’s grisly death brought renewed focus to the worldwide problem of plastics ending up in oceans; a 2015 study estimated that five million to 13 million metric tons of plastic waste pollute oceans each year. But the problem is particularly severe in the Philippines, the world’s third-biggest contributor of plastic to oceans behind China and Indonesia.

Remember: more plastic debris than fish in the sea by 2050.

Some would say, "Do something about it. Stop buying plastic." I have basically. I'm not sure that my grocer even offers heads of lettuce anymore. Fresh juice doesn't come in glass containers.

Late-stage capitalism and colossal, ocean-choking plastic waste are synonymous.

The Horrible Hope

One can arrive at a place of what appears to be maximal personal virtue. Vices have been eliminated. No drugs, no alcohol, no meat, no dairy, no tobacco, no junk food, no fornication. I buy organic. I am vegan. I exercise. I recycle. I compost. I consume on average less three kilowatt-hours of electricity per day in my humble studio apartment. I don't take public transit to work; I walk.

But recently I have been nagged by a suspicion that my apparent virtue is fraudulent. What makes me feel this way is that just about whatever I consume I deposit a nib of non-recyclable plastic into the garbage -- the little pull-top to the coconut milk container; the cap to mango juice bottle; the bag that holds the stir-fry faux-beef soy strips. Granted, it takes a while to fill up a trash container with these non-recyclable nibs and sheets. But in less than a month's time I have a shopping bag full of plastic destined for the landfill and from there likely the ocean.

That's why this blurb from today's Significant Digits caught my eye:

8,300 million metric tons of plastic

We humans have made a ton of plastic during our time on Earth — well, about 8,300 million metric tons. Most of it is now in the ocean or the dump. But some of it — like Neil Armstrong’s spacesuit or works of contemporary art — we’re trying very hard to preserve. Unexpectedly, plastics are a great challenge for conservators. The material is unpredictable and there is “huge variation in forms of deterioration.” [The New York Times]

If you're going to read one thing this weekend read Troy Vettese's "To Freeze The Thames," which appears in the May-June issue of New Left Review. It is a revelation.

The Little Ice Age of the 17th Century was likely triggered by a massive die-off of humans indigenous to the Americas. This returned a huge amount of agricultural land to the wild, which took a lot of carbon out of the atmosphere.

Vettese says that we can achieve the same results without the die-off if we take most agricultural land out of production and return it to the wild. People will have to go vegan because a significant portion of agricultural is tied up in producing feed grain for livestock. 

Basically, E.O. Wilson's half-earthing is possible but almost everyone in the developed world is going to have to live a radically different life.

Sadly, this is politically impossible. So what we are left with is a hope that is hard to swallow: A massive human die-off in the next few decades.