The reason we have a problem with plastic can be explained with the principles of compound interest. As many of us learned as a child, if a penny doubles every day for 30 days, you will be a multi-millionaire. The lesser-known version of the story involves of the origins of chess. The game was presented to the emperor. Impressed by the gift, he grants the inventor his request for what appears to be a token reward. One grain of wheat (or rice) on the first square, with double the amount on each successive square. It’s not likely that the reward for the last square would fit on the chessboard as the quantity of over 18 quintillion grains (yes, that’s 18 with eighteen zeros following) outstrips even the current world production of grains.
In a world where the plastic industry has plans for tripling production by 2050, both stories are instructive. Producers of plastic make lots of money selling plastic. Assign the pennies story to them. As we know, pennies can be converted into dollars, and in today’s world, dollars are stored as electronic totals. That number is far easier to carry around than the coins they represent, and it takes up no room at all.
Let’s turn our attention to the output of plastic production (bottles, plates, cups, etc.). Assign the chessboard grain story to them. Unlike pennies, grains cannot be converted into a digital counterpart and will always take up physical space. The only way the pile of grain gets smaller is to grind it down and make something new out of it or let it go to waste (with a few grains scattered by the winds to litter the landscape).
This is similar to what happens to plastic outputs. The difference is that unlike the grain pile, turning plastic into something new isn’t as easy as turning grains into beers and breads. Plastics require sorting into the individual base plastics (the ♺ 1-7 imprinted on the plastic item) and even that relatively straightforward process is not enough to turn a used plastic item into a new one. Manufacturers need to account for the thousands of potential combinations of chemicals (plasticizers, colorants, stabilizers, and other fillers) in the reclaimed material when creating their “recycled content” products. The health and safety of some of these additional chemicals have been called into question, including suspected carcinogens.
The grain pile analogy has one other key difference. If the grain’s owner wasted 6% of the pile, it would be disastrous for profits – indeed, in a real-world scenario where the owner would have to purchase the grain first, the margins are usually so slim that he or she would soon be bankrupt. In the real-world of plastics recycling, only 6 percent of single-use items are recycled in the US. With the Bottle Bill in New York, our state’s percentage is higher but that still leaves 80-90 percent of our throwaway plastics as waste to be burned in polluting “waste to energy” incinerators or buried in landfills.
It shouldn’t take a PhD in Urban Planning to see that the Plastic Industry’s PHD (Piled Higher and Deeper) approach to the end-of-life management of plastics is a waste of resources and is unsustainable – especially considering that the mountain of plastics waste around the world has doubled every 20 years. The NYS Legislature is considering the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act (PRRIA – A1749/S1464), a bill that would transfer the burden of processing the waste created by manufacturers to package their products from the taxpayers to industry. Modeled on other successful Extended Producer Responsibility laws in Canada and the European Union, businesses have shown that they can meet the challenges set in this bill. Many have already included these concepts in their corporate sustainability targets.
There are incentives in the bill to encourage producers to reduce their costs by reducing the amount of packaging or redesigning it to be more easily recyclable. Other items in the bill include banning a number of common chemical additives that have been shown to impact human health as well as to set a required minimum recycled content percentage for packaging.
With our landfills nearing capacity throughout the State, the State’s Solid Waste Plan is counting on this landmark bill (as well as an expanded Bottle Bill – A6543/S5684) as a way to meet their waste management goals. A Siena College Research Institute poll done earlier this year shows strong support for this bill throughout the state with nearly three-quarters of the respondents in favor of requiring all companies with an annual net income of over $1 million (the threshold written into the PRRIA) to reduce packaging on their products.
The State Senate did its job by passing the bill last week. With a majority of the Assembly co-sponsoring the PRRIA, it is imperative that Assembly Leader Carl Heastie brings this for a vote ASAP. There is no excuse for it to get lost again in the end-of-session shuffle this year.
Lead image: Glick and harckham @ PRRIA press conference