Annotated: Global Plastics Study

This post is a part of a series that forms an annotated reading list; all posts in the series can be found here.

Today, I read Just Six Companies Create About a Quarter of Global Plastic Waste, Survey Finds by Joseph Winters on Mother Jones (Apple News Link).

There appears to be a correlation between the amount of plastic introduced into the ecosystem by a company and the toll those same plastics take on the ecosystem itself. The article goes into some detail about a research study that put numbers to that seemingly obvious assumption. Science!

That plastic production should be correlated with plastic pollution is intuitive, but until now there has been little quantitative research to prove it—especially on a company-by-company basis. Perhaps the most significant related research in this area appeared in a 2020 paper published in Environmental Science and Technology showing that overall marine plastic pollution was growing alongside global plastic production. Other research since then has documented the rapidly expanding “plastic smog” in the world’s oceans and forecasted a surge in plastic production over the next several decades.

I am not sure about my readership (numbers or types of people), but I have been very interested of late in the notion that plastics should be avoided from top to bottom in the supply chain because regardless of their ability to be recycled, there is a lot of evidence that 1) most of it never is; 2) quite a bit of the information about recycling of plastics is confusing, wrong, or inconsistent in practice; and 3) there is very little option for decomposition (so it sticks around forever).

It’s worth noting that many of the companies’ plans involve replacing virgin plastic with recycled material. This does not necessarily address the problem outlined in the Science Advances study, since plastic products are no less likely to become litter just because they’re made of recycled content. There’s also a limit to the number of times plastic can be recycled—experts say just two or three times—before it must be sent to a landfill or an incinerator. Many plastic items cannot be recycled at all.

This is the crux of my statement above. Exhibit A of sorts is the notion that cities recycle—US cities often use the mixed recycling system that renders some items worthless to that cause—but curbside pickup only takes certain things. Those things curbside doesn't take can potentially be brought to drop-off sites—admittedly not mixed so potentially more consistent—but it likely requires you to have a car and be willing and able to drive distances to accomplish it. And finally, store drop-off for things like plastic bags, but not all plastic bags are created equal and there is no knowing what stores actually do with the bags once you drop them off.

Many of the top polluters identified in the study have made voluntary commitments to address their outsize plastic footprint. Coca-Cola, for example, says it aims to reduce its use of “virgin plastic derived from nonrenewable sources” by 3 million metric tons over the next five years, and to sell a quarter of its beverages in reusable or refillable containers by 2030.

Three things about this passage, first two: voluntary and 2030. Expecting for-profit companies to act for the greater good is a part of what makes capitalism so detrimental for the environment. Also, there is always a nebulous date in the future that is supposed to see great change that will solve an issue. The third thing is the ask: reusable or refillable containers. Unless a large portion of global companies can band together (which generally comes from pushes in regulation) and/or amazing innovation can occur in this space to make plastics all but disappear from the supply chain, reusable receptacles for drinks seem to be a non-starter, especially because the most common reusable receptacles of today are made of plastic.

So questions from an engineering mind, food for thought: In a hypothetical future where single-use plastics have all but been removed from the supply chain, where would one refill their receptacle? Would you be able to choose any beverage? Take the Starbucks Red Cup program, would it become commonplace to carry these receptacles around everywhere just in case you want to stop? If someone forgot their reusable receptacle, would there be a premium to replace it? And what happens when you have 100 of these receptacles? Or worse, when these receptacles all but replace single use plastics in the supply chain and make more of a problem? Will they be made from compostable materials or be easily recycled?

Long story short, this is a two-sided problem: the companies introducing plastics into the ecosystem and the behaviors built out over decades of disposability. It won't be as simple as Coca-Cola deciding they can fix the problem with a few reusable cups.