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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
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.
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
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
SPERM WHALE DIED AFTER EASTING 29kg OF PLASTIC WASTE
Sperm whale ‘died after consuming 29kg of plastic waste’
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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.
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.
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”.
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Australian inventor finds a way to use anaerobic digestion on plastic and gets fertilizer and methane amongst other useful byproducts.
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.
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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.
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Wave of plastic hits Dominican Republic
This was the scene on a beach in the Dominican Republic after a storm last Thursday.
We spoke to the organisation who shot the footage of the plastic on the shoreline.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-44914919/wave-of-plastic-hits-dominican-republic
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I would like to get to this spot and help the community to make tarps, hammocks, baskets and buckets out of this plastic for their home use.
Greens claim incineration is blocking recycling
This story highlights some of the disagreements over future strategies for dealing with plastic waste. The Green Party position (at least in England & Wales) is that incineration is a bad thing. At the very least they talk about the addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and usually there is an accompanying complaint about “toxic” emissions.
Unfortunately, the fantasy that “recycling” actually exists, at any meaningful scale, is still strong. Statistics that include waste exports as “recycling” are still being quoted, even though we now know they are false.
Of course if incineration is prevented, and recycling is largely impossible, then that has to leave landfill as the preferred “green” temporary solution – with the phasing out of polymer manufacture as being the ultimate goal.
Plastic food pots and trays are often unrecyclable, say councils
This si still understating the problem, I reckon.
Map reveals ‘scourge’ of Scotland’s coastal litter problem
“We thought we would just be finding small amounts of scattered plastic, domestic rubbish but it’s not that. It’s industrial rubbish we’ve been finding. “It’s a huge amount of plastic containers that look like they have come off ships. There’s fish boxes, there’s fish nets, there’s old bits of cable. We are talking metric tonnes of stuff in some places.”
We won’t save the Earth with a better kind of disposable coffee cup
– George Monbiot
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/06/save-earth-disposable-coffee-cup-green
We must challenge the corporations that urge us to live in a throwaway society rather than seeking ‘greener’ ways of maintaining the status quo
Giant plastic-catcher gets towed out to tackle ocean garbage patches.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-45438736
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/
UK recycling industry under investigation for fraud and corruption
The plastics recycling industry is facing an investigation into suspected widespread abuse and fraud within the export system amid warnings the world is about to close the door on UK packaging waste, the Guardian has learned.
The Environment Agency (EA) has set up a team of investigators, including three retired police officers, in an attempt to deal with complaints that organised criminals and firms are abusing the system.
Six UK exporters of plastic waste have had their licences suspended or cancelled in the last three months, according to EA data. One firm has had 57 containers of plastic waste stopped at UK ports in the last three years due to concerns over contamination of waste.
Deep sea creatures found to have been feasting on plastic for more than 40 years
“Mass production of plastics only began in the 1940s and 1950s, so it would be reasonable to expect less plastic in our earlier samples, with a subsequent upward trend to the present-day levels,” said lead author Winnie Courtene-Jones, a doctoral student at the University of the Highlands and Islands and SAMS.”But we haven’t seen that. In fact, the level of microplastic ingestion is remarkably similar throughout the time series.”This data shows, for the first time, the long-term prevalence of microplastic pollution in the deep sea and indicated that microplastics may have been present on the sea floor of the Rockall Trough prior to 1976.”
Dead sperm whale found in Indonesia had ingested ‘6kg of plastic’
A dead sperm whale that washed ashore in a national park in Indonesia had nearly 6kg (13 lbs) of plastic waste in its stomach, park officials say. Items found included 115 drinking cups, four plastic bottles, 25 plastic bags and two flip-flops. The carcass of the 9.5m (31ft) mammal was found in waters near Kapota Island in the Wakatobi National Park late on Monday.
There’s ‘tons’ of those lately.
There are more useful ways of listing/storing them than a thread here, although how to do it also depends on what you want those news items for.
Great Pacific garbage patch $20m cleanup fails to collect plastic
A giant floating barrier launched off the coast of San Francisco as part of a $20m project to cleanup a swirling island of rubbish between California and Hawaii, is failing to collect plastic.
The mastermind behind the Ocean Cleanup, an ambitious plan to clear a swathe of the Pacific twice the size of Texas of floating debris, reported four weeks into testing that while the U-shaped device was scooping up plastic, it was then losing it.
Inventor Boyan Slat, 24, said that the slow speed of the solar-powered 600m-long barrier means it is unable to hold on to plastics, but a team of experts is now working on a possible fix.
“What we’re trying to do has never been done before. So, of course we were expecting to still need to fix a few things before it becomes fully operational,” Slat explained.
If we care about plastic waste, why won’t we stop drinking bottled water?
Environmental campaigners are struggling to fathom why nations blessed with clean tap water grow only fonder of the bottle. “It’s very surprising to me,” says Sam Chetan-Walsh, a political adviser at Greenpeace and campaigner against ocean plastic. “Public awareness has never been higher, but the message is not quite reaching all the people it needs to.”
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
Another story about the floating trash collector:
https://www.notechmagazine.com/2016/01/trash-collecting-water-wheel.html
And a more comprehensive article about boat-mills:
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2010/11/boat-mills-bridge-mills-and-hanging-mills.html
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It was funny, on the trash wheel page, they listed what was in the 1,000,000 pounds of thrash they collected. Along with the usual was one ball python….I hope whoever was sorting trash that morning had their coffee.
Coca-Cola most common source of packaging pollution on UK beaches – study
The results came from a series of 229 beach cleans organised by the anti-pollution campaigning group in April, which found close to 50,000 pieces of waste. About 20,000 of these carried identifiable brands, of which Coca-Cola was the leader, followed by Walkers crisps, Cadbury’s, McDonald’s and Nestlé.
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It’s literally everywhere now:
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/victor-vescovo-deepest-dive-pacific/index.html
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