Planet Plastic

Plastic is everywhere: From cutlery and packaging to clothing and electronics, some 9.2 billion tons of plastic have been produced in the past 70 years. Whether these plastics are single-use or longer-lived, many ultimately become environmental pollutants. When plastics are improperly discarded, they can find their way into waterways such as rivers. From there, plastic flows into the sea, where it is engulfed by one of the world’s five oceanic dumps, offshore plastic gyres that teem with polypropylene and other non-degradable plastics. These gyres are the product of natural ocean currents; at five key places in the world’s oceans, the flow of water draws in drifting garbage. The resulting trash islands mar landscapes and ecosystems, endangering biodiversity and human health.

Even as NGOs such as The Ocean Cleanup work to clean up the mess, 2.4 million tons of trash continue to flow into the world’s oceans every year. This is partly due to an insatiable demand for plastic products, especially in OECD countries. But despite generating more waste — both per capita and cumulatively — than their poorer counterparts, high-income countries have also gotten relatively good at managing it. Instead, the problem of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans is largely caused by poor waste management infrastructure in the developing world. In some countries, waste never makes it to a landfill, let alone a recycling facility.

The United States has a highly advanced and effective waste management system when compared with these developing countries: Virtually 0 percent of U.S. waste is mismanaged, and a number of U.S. cities and states have passed legislation to reduce the amount of plastic thrown away in the first place. Yet for the United States, stemming the flow of plastic into the world’s oceans will require more than implementing domestic policies to encourage plastic reduction and support ocean cleanup efforts. The United States must work with developing countries to create cost-effective waste management systems that put trash where it belongs.

Searching for Solutions

Swirling on the surface of the Pacific roughly halfway between Hawaii and California is a collection of plastic bottles, bags, wrappers, food containers, and fragments that weighs as much as 80,000 tons, the equivalent of 15 jumbo jets. Called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, this ocean gyre has a surface area twice the size of Texas and a density that has grown exponentially since the 1970s. Worst of all, the GPGP is only one of five garbage patches where the world’s trash accumulates.

The plastic that ends up in these gyres appears to be there to stay. Researchers are not sure how long certain kinds of plastic persist before eventually breaking down, but some estimates say it could take as long as 450 years. Others maintain that ocean plastics will never degrade.

Besides being an eyesore, plastic gyres threaten biodiversity. Of the more than 700 species affected by ocean plastic, some 67 are red-listed as threatened species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. When animals are not getting entangled in plastic, they often end up eating it: One study found that sea turtles living near a plastic gyre had diets composed of up to 74 percent plastic by weight. And since ocean plastics have been exposed to the elements, they can also leach chemicals into the water, poisoning fish and eventually affecting humans through bioaccumulation: As it moves up the food chain, plastic concentrates in the bodies of larger predators until finally ending up on our dinner plates.

While countries and municipalities around the world have a number of options when it comes to easing the oceans’ plastic burden, it can be hard to know which strategy will be most effective. To help identify effective interventions, the Plastic Pollution Emissions Working Group, an international coalition of researchers, activists, and policymakers, has begun using data and science to find out how to curb these gyres’ exponential growth.

“We’re trying to understand the flow of plastic during its life cycle,” explained Chelsea Rochman, an ecotoxicologist at the University of Toronto and a leading investigator at Plastic PEG, in an interview with the HPR. Plastic is ‘born’ into this life cycle when it is produced and it only ‘dies’ once it finally leaves the system — that is, when it outlives its usefulness and has been discarded. Ideally, this means the plastic is sent to an environmentally responsible waste management facility or to a recycling plant where it can be repurposed.

However, in the absence of mitigation strategies, this life cycle ‘ends’ with plastic being deposited into one of those five offshore plastic gyres. Plastic PEG wants to prevent this outcome by pinpointing the most promising opportunities for intervention. Ultimately, Plastic PEG aims to produce a web-based app that any government official could use, whether in a major developed city or in a developing one. The app would analyze cities’ municipal waste data and tell them which mitigation strategies — including bag bans, container deposit schemes, or redoubled recycling efforts — would prove most effective in preventing plastic from reaching the ocean.

Although Rochman hopes that the Plastic PEG app will inform policy changes in the United States and other OECD countries, applying the group’s findings to countries in the developing world will present a new set of challenges. The current, unfinished form of the Plastic PEG algorithm has two versions to account for these differences: one for developed nations and another for developing ones.

Managing Waste in the Developing World

As the world’s second largest generator of plastic waste — producing nearly 38 million tons per year — the United States’ appetite for plastic is far from sustainable. Per capita, Americans go through more plastic than any other people on Earth, and less than 10 percent of that plastic waste is recycled. However, in terms of overall plastic waste management, the United States is far ahead of the developing world: Nearly all American plastic that is not recycled is sent to regulated landfills and incinerators.

In the developing world, the waste management landscape is not nearly as effective. Rather than deciding between a blue or black bin, citizens may be tossing plastics into “wild dumps,” unregulated local landfills that will likely produce chemical leachate and runoff to the ocean. People may even be dumping trash directly into rivers. A 2017 study by the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research found that roughly 90 percent of the ocean’s trash is exported from the land by 10 major rivers located mostly in China, South Asia, and, to a lesser extent, Africa. This is because many municipalities in these parts of the world — which, with roughly 4 billion people, account for as much as half of the global population, — have no official waste management system, let alone recycling or composting infrastructure.

Plastic reduction initiatives are gaining traction in OECD countries, but for every plastic bag ban introduced in a U.S. city, there are thousands of municipalities in the developing world without access to consistent, effective trash collection services. Implementing these services will require a monumental effort from local governments. Delphine Lévi Alvarès, coordinator for the Rethink Plastic Alliance, a coalition of European NGOs working to reduce plastic pollution, stresses the importance of taking small steps to address the plastics crisis. “If you look at the top of the mountain, you just don’t start climbing,” Alvarès told the HPR. “We’re looking at the different base camps and continuing the ascent like that.”

According to the World Bank, a developing city’s first priority should be establishing a professional, environmentally sound trash collection service. Only once the service achieves full coverage by reaching everyone in the city and is sufficiently inexpensive can the city consider moving up the “waste hierarchy” to projects like creating a recycling infrastructure.

However, even at its most basic, waste management is not cheap. Municipalities must pay for collection vehicles, drivers’ wages, office spaces, and street cleaning services just to ensure the most fundamental waste management operations. In the developing world, these operational costs can comprise 20 to 50 percent of a municipality’s budget. Each layer of complexity, including features like curbside composting, adds to the cost. There are also high costs associated with outsourcing waste services to a third party with the skills to maintain landfills, clean up groundwater, and capture leachate.

In most municipalities in the developing world, these costs are largely covered by taxpayers. As Michael Orr, recycling director at the Department of Public Works in Cambridge, Massachusetts, explained to the HPR, however, citizens likely will never see line-by-line charges for each part of the waste management process: “It’s just embedded in their taxes,” Orr said.

As a public service funded by its users, basic waste management should never require citizens to pay more than 1 percent of their household’s disposable income according to the World Bank. More expensive systems may require government subsidies that, in addition to posing political challenges, can actually disincentivize waste reduction. Consumers may be less willing to reduce plastic consumption when they know that their government will fund trash collection regardless of how much trash they generate. For these reasons, city planners must think creatively about how to boost waste management systems’ efficiency, including by finding ways to make recycling or composting economically preferable to trash disposal.

State and national policies can also encourage effective waste management. A trash tax, for example, can catalyze policy changes at the municipal level. Governments can also mandate the closure of wild dumps and landfills, and impose limits on trash incineration. However, these strategies only work in conjunction with actions to reduce waste overall and divert it to new management streams like recycling.

Finally, national governments can provide grant funding to cities that want to improve their waste management systems. This too can require some creativity on the part of government officials. For example, if waste management initiatives are described as climate change initiatives — unregulated dumps release methane into the air, after all — countries can receive special funding from organizations like the Green Climate Fund.

Leading by Example

Beyond reducing their own plastic consumption, one way wealthy nations can help clean up the oceans’ existing plastic pollution is by investing in new technologies. Last September, The Ocean Cleanup launched System 001 from the docks of San Francisco with the goal of reducing the GPGP’s size by 50 percent within five years. System 001, a 600-meter-long floater connected to a three-meter-deep skirt, was carried by ocean currents towards the GPGP, where its skirt entraps ocean plastic for removal by a cleanup vessel. By 2040, the Ocean Cleanup hopes to eliminate 90 percent of the gyre’s plastic.

While The Ocean Cleanup’s reports of early success are promising, there are still four more gyres to deal with in the world’s oceans, and it is unclear whether System 001 or a similar cleanup effort can outpace growing rates of plastic pollution.

Wealthier cities and their advanced waste management infrastructures can be active role models for municipalities in the developing world. The Climate and Clean Air Coalition, for example, helps facilitate partnerships between ‘mentor’ cities and cities that want to reduce their contribution to global pollution. “You have to show them this has been done before,” explained Sandra Mazo-Nix, the CCAC’s municipal solid waste initiative coordinator, in an interview with the HPR. This April, Mazo-Nix is helping pair the Swedish city of Umea — which formally collects almost 100 percent of its trash and only sends 2 percent of its waste to landfills — with Ho Chi Minh City, where some 16,000 unlicensed “garbage-pickers” collect an unknown amount of the city’s trash. Of the municipal solid waste collected through Ho Chi Minh City’s official service, up to 85 percent is sent to landfills. Mazo-Nix hopes that this kind of inter-city collaboration can help jumpstart more sustainable waste management solutions in the developing world.

Cambridge, Massachusetts continues to model one of the most comprehensive and effective waste management systems in the United States. According to Orr, state-level recycling policies have brought Cambridge to nearly 100 percent recycling participation, and Orr estimated that the municipal composting service, which expanded citywide in April 2018, has reached about 50 percent participation.

Now, Orr reported, Cambridge has its eyes set on a 30 percent reduction in trash output from 2008 levels by the year 2020. So far, the city is well on its way to achieving that goal, having already hit a 25 percent reduction as of December 2018. In addition to the city’s comprehensive recycling and composting programs, a statewide moratorium on new landfills and new limits on trash incineration facilities have given city planners an economic incentive to cut down on garbage: It now costs more to throw stuff away than to recycle or compost it.

“Who knows what the future brings,” said Orr, “but I hope that people look to us to push the needle forward a little more. We’re hopeful that we can help lead the way.” Cambridge remains a powerful example of how U.S. cities can support a greater movement toward effective waste management around the world.

Image Credit: Unsplash/Dustan Woodhouse

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