Plastics Related Stories in the Media
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I wondered if there could be a thread for recording links to plastics related stories in the general media (newspapers, TV channels, podcasts). It could be stories about the plastics industry, or about plastic polution, or existing methods of dealing with waste, etc.
I’ll start off with this story from The Guardian in December 2017:
$180bn investment in plastic factories feeds global packaging binge
Colossal funding in manufacturing plants by fossil fuel companies will increase plastic production by 40%, risking permanent pollution of the earth
I kept all my plastic for a year – the 4,490 items forced me to rethink
Daniel Webb accrued a mountain of plastic
One early evening in mid-2016, Daniel Webb, 36, took a run along the coast near his home in Margate. “It was one of those evenings where the current had brought in lots of debris,” he recalls, because as Webb looked down at the beach from his route along the promenade he noticed a mass of seaweed, tangled with many pieces of plastic. “Old toys, probably 20 years old, bottles that must have been from overseas because they had all kinds of different languages on them, bread tags, which I don’t think had been used for years …” he says. “It was very nostalgic, almost archaeological. And it made me think, as a mid-30s guy, is any of my plastic out there? Had I once dropped a toy in a stream near Wolverhampton, where I’m from, and now it was out in the sea?”
Webb decided that he would start a project to keep all the plastic he used in the course of an entire year. He would not modify his plastic consumption in that time (although he had already given up buying bottled water), and each item would be carefully washed and stored in his spare room.
SPERM WHALE DIED AFTER EASTING 29kg OF PLASTIC WASTE
Sperm whale ‘died after consuming 29kg of plastic waste’
50 minute Podcast from BBC world Service
How Do We Cure Our Plastic Addiction?
We have a problem with plastic. We’re making too much of it and not re-using and re-cycling enough of it. Plastic is contaminating our oceans and polluting our world. Until this year China took two thirds of the world’s plastic waste, but now it’s saying it will no longer be the world’s dumping ground. The Chinese ban on low quality plastic has begun to bite with policy makers urgently looking for new solutions. So what happens now? What has the situation done to expose the way our plastics are recycled? And will developments result in a watershed moment where we finally re-evaluate our plastic consumption? Join Carrie Gracie and a panel of experts discuss how we cure our addiction to plastic.
Ted.com:
Humans produce 300 million tons of new plastic each year — yet, despite our best efforts, less than 10 percent of it ends up being recycled. Is there a better way to deal with all this waste? Microbiologist Morgan Vague studies bacteria that, through some creative adaptations, have evolved the unexpected ability to eat plastic — and could help us solve our growing pollution problem.
Arena at Glastonbury to be made entirely from recycled plastic
https://www.nme.com/news/music/arena-at-glastonbury-to-be-made-entirely-from-recycled-plastic-2485973
From the Guardian in February 2017
Campaigners reject plastics-to-fuel projects: but are they right?
A rural residential community is not the right site to be testing this technology,” says Naomi Joyce, a solicitor from Appley Bridge, Lancashire. Born and raised in the village, Joyce helped to lead its fight against a proposed waste-to-fuel plant, which had hoped to convert up to 6,000 tonnes of plastic rubbish into diesel, gasoline and other products each year.
Worried that harmful fumes would pollute their valley, locals rallied against the proposal – signing petitions, writing to the council and protesting in the street. In January last year, the project was shelved.
Proponents of the rapidly growing plastics-to-fuel sector, tipped to be worth $1.9bn (£1.5bn) by 2024, say their technology will help to keep plastic rubbish out of our oceans and away from landfill. By melting non-recyclable plastics into liquid fuel, they claim to offer a new and vital solution to the planet’s plastic waste crisis.
Grassroots opponents disagree – and they are getting in the industry’s way. After Appley Bridge in the UK, the latest protest is taking place in the Australian city of Canberra.
pyrolysis
From the Guardian in February 2017
Campaigners reject plastics-to-fuel projects: but are they right?
A rural residential community is not the right site to be testing this technology,” says Naomi Joyce, a solicitor from Appley Bridge, Lancashire. Born and raised in the village, Joyce helped to lead its fight against a proposed waste-to-fuel plant, which had hoped to convert up to 6,000 tonnes of plastic rubbish into diesel, gasoline and other products each year.
Worried that harmful fumes would pollute their valley, locals rallied against the proposal – signing petitions, writing to the council and protesting in the street. In January last year, the project was shelved.
Proponents of the rapidly growing plastics-to-fuel sector, tipped to be worth $1.9bn (£1.5bn) by 2024, say their technology will help to keep plastic rubbish out of our oceans and away from landfill. By melting non-recyclable plastics into liquid fuel, they claim to offer a new and vital solution to the planet’s plastic waste crisis.
Grassroots opponents disagree – and they are getting in the industry’s way. After Appley Bridge in the UK, the latest protest is taking place in the Australian city of Canberra.
Tags: fuel pyrolysis protests
Thanks, I think that part of the story needs to get some solid numbers behind it and push governments to stop the exports and deal with their own mess. In the US there is an attempt to push distracting, feel-good laws like banning hotel shampoo bottles in the hopes that people forget that we are exporting millions of tons each year that are mislabeled as recycling.
Costa Rica Has Banned Styrofoam (actually it means they will ban expanded polystyrene containers in two years time)
Malaysia sending thousands of tons of rubbish back to the countries it came from.
https://edition-m.cnn.com/2019/05/28/asia/malaysia-plastic-waste-return-intl/index.html
And other southeast Asia countries are doing the same.
I suspect it was the bad scripts, wooden acting, and wobbly scenery that left me scarred…
As a ten year-old kid, I was exposed to this.
It left me mentally scarred – for life.
People need to be very careful over what they wish for… 😉
On a more positive note, I saw this the other day https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2019/04/mr-trash-wheel/ …..Probably should be a few of these on every river
A group of Argentinian workers occupying a closed down plastic-recycling plant wants to run it as a co-operative.
The former workers at the Bitoplast factory, near Rio Tala in the province of Buenos Aires, have been occupying the building since its closure. They claim the factory owner owes them two months’ salary.
The group has held meetings with workers experienced in taking over recovered factories to enable them to move forward as a co-op. And they’re continuing their occupation in the dark after the building’s electricity supplier cut the power due to non-payment of bills.
Now they have asked for the power to be reconnected and appealed for help from the local council to pay the outstanding bill, on the understanding it will be reimbursed once the co-op is up and running.
“The idea is to be able to start working, to take charge of the factory,” said Juan Céjas, one of the workers. “We do not want to pay the electricity but if we can subsidise this debt, we can return the money when we start working.”
“The intention is to move forward in a co-operative,” continued Juan, who was thankful for the support of numerous Argentinian worker organisations that have been sending the group supplies. “All help and support is appreciated, at least we are know we’re not forgotten.”
https://www.thenews.coop/132542/topic/business/factory-protesters-want-revive-shut-business-co-op/
Can Norway help us solve the plastic crisis, one bottle at a time?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/12/can-norway-help-us-solve-the-plastic-crisis-one-bottle-at-a-time
These figures don’t seem to quite stack up
Maldum is the chief executive of Infinitum, the organisation which runs Norway’s deposit return scheme for plastic bottles and cans. Its success is unarguable – 97% of all plastic drinks bottles in Norway are recycled, 92% to such a high standard that they are turned back into drinks bottles. Maldum says some of the material has been recycled more than 50 times already. Less than 1% of plastic bottles end up in the environment.
Later it says:
But even with the success of Norway’s scheme there are still challenges. Recycled material only provides 10% of the plastic used in bottles in the country, the rest – because oil is cheap – comes from newly manufactured “virgin” material.Maldum says the system produces enough high-grade material to meet 80% of demand – much of which is currently exported.
From the Guardian:
The man who paves India’s roads with old plastic
The idea emerged from his workshop at the Thiagarajar College of Engineering in Madurai as far back as 2001. Disturbed by calls to ban plastic, which he believed was important to poor people, he wanted to find a solution to the growing environmental challenges it raised.
“Ban plastic and it can severely affect the quality of life for a low-income family,” he says. “But if you burn it or bury it, it’s bound to affect the environment.”
And so, he began a series of experiments in his workshop to discover effective disposal techniques. In a molten condition, he found that plastic had the property of an excellent binder. Acting on the principle that like attracts like, Dr Vasudevan looked at another chemical of similar nature: bitumen, a black tarry substance that was being combined with gravel to lay roads.
“Bitumen, a highly heterogeneous mixture of hydrocarbons is in effect, composed of polymerssimilar to plastic,” he says. When molten plastic was added to stone and bitumen mix, Dr Vasudevan found that, true to its nature, plastic stuck fast and bound both materials together.
Australian inventor finds a way to use anaerobic digestion on plastic and gets fertilizer and methane amongst other useful byproducts.
From the BBC:
Marine plastic: Hundreds of fragments in dead seabirds
“Seabirds are starving to death on the remote Lord Howe Island, a crew filming for the BBC One documentary Drowning in Plastic has revealed. Their stomachs were so full of plastic there was no room for food. The marine biologists the team filmed are working on the island to save the birds. They captured hundreds of chicks – as they left their nests – to physically flush plastic from their stomachs and “give them a chance to survive”.
From the Guardian:
The environmental scourge of plastic has shot to the top of the political agenda. We talk to the creatives and campaigners behind five imaginative new ventures
Meet the anti-plastic warriors: the pioneers with bold solutions to waste
Among retailers and manufacturers, they talk of “the Blue Planet effect”. The BBC series, screened late last year, was the moment that many of us realised the catastrophic impact our use of plastics was having on the world’s oceans. Scenes such as a hawksbill turtle snagged in a plastic sack, the albatrosses feeding their chicks plastic or the mother pilot whale grieving for her dead calf, which may have been poisoned by her contaminated milk, are impossible to unsee.
It’s a crisis that affects us all, and the facts make for dispiriting reading. If nothing changes, one study suggests that by 2050 our oceans will have more plastic swimming around, by weight, than fish. It’s already estimated that one third of fish caught in the Channel contain plastic; another piece of research found that “top European shellfish consumers” could potentially consume up to 11,000 pieces of microplastic a year.
Suddenly our use of plastics is firmly on the political and cultural agenda. While impassioned individuals have been pushing to reduce our use of plastics for a few years, the volume of the debate has been turned up dramatically in recent months.
too bad, all this nice efforts and posts have been killed 🙁
I really miss the good and old flair of PP – it’s all gone – on Discord we have now just a tiny fraction of what has been contributed here in the forums – I wanna meet this guys who killed it and …. them …. for hours long 🙂
@frogfall, @s2019, and all the others – I miss you guys, really
Hi @s2019 – good question.
This story suggest not a lot is being recycled.
There are not nearly enough recycling facilities to process their own domestic plastic waste – so it seems the extra imported waste is mostly being burned or dumped.
This item in Wikipedia tells a similar tale:
The report warned that there were regulation violations in the disposal of imported plastic waste to the country (plastic is burned on roadsides in the open-air, dumped in unregulated or poorly regulated dump sites close to bodies of water, discarded in abandoned buildings or just left to degrade and rot in the open) thus contributing to environmental pollution and harmful health impact for Malaysians.
Malaysia returns 42 containers of ‘illegal’ plastic waste to UK
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51176312
The plastic polluters won 2019 – and we’re running out of time to stop them
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/02/year-plastic-pollution-clean-beaches-seas
Revealed: microplastic pollution is raining down on city dwellers
Endangered red squirrel dies trapped in plastic jar
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-44977743
Western plastics ‘poisoning Indonesian food chain’
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-50392807?intlink_from_url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/c6lpgw300llt/plastic-pollution&link_location=live-reporting-story
Stag died after being tangled in plastic tape on Jura
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-50432013
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