This morning I was glancing through all of my Substacks and came across one dealing with recycled plastics. It came with a disgusting and depressing photo of a field full of recycled plastics in Kenya. We in the west have picked up the plastics that have been willingly recycled by eager, environmental beavers and exported them to the end of the line, Africa, but now Africa is developing and does not need or want plastic detritus that will take eons to fade into the earth. We swept the dirt under the rug, but we are all the rug pull stage.
The writer’s’ opinion is that recycling has failed, and people have known this for a long time without doing much about it.
It seems almost bizarre that we have created so much debris with plastics just during just my lifetime. It’s not as if plastics have always been there. They are relatively new and they have already defiled the environment.
Do you remember the Dustin Hoffman movie from the 1960s in which Hoffman plays “The Graduate”? At a party, he is told what field he should be exploring now that he is out of school. It was Mr. McGuire, (Walter Brooke) who gave Dustin Hoffman's character, Benjamin Braddock, the advice to go into plastics.
The line "I just want to say one word to you—just one word: plastics," has become so famous that it's now a pop culture reference all on its own. Mr. McGuire was right; plastics soon became big business and now we find that plastic containers are eternal. They wash up on beaches, hang out on the bottom of oceans and gum up our bodies.
In some ways plastics are like energy itself; they cannot be created nor destroyed.
But some optimists are trying.There is now a full-blown movement to get rid of single use plastic packaging. If you remember my unforgettable essay on toothpaste, you will probably figure out that the change in toothpaste format is related to a larger change in how personal care products and cleaning products come into our homes. To wit: they come in glass. Refillable glass.
About a year ago, I discovered Blueland.com, a site that offers sustainable cleaning products.
That work. (Many do not).
Blueland admits that most cleaning products contain mostly water, and its female founder (yay) has come to the brilliant conclusion that you can buy a container once, and then refill it from your own water source. Blueland just sends you the concentrated pellets of cleaner when you need them.
Razor, razor blades anyone?
That brings me to the last straw in the environmental products movement. The first straw, which you probably have forgotten about, was the banning of plastic drinking straws by some cities. Seattle became the first major city in the US to ban plastic straws in 2018, and Washington, DC banned them in 2019. Other cities, such as New York City, Charleston, South Carolina, and Miami Beach, Florida, have also banned plastic straws.
Some brands, including Starbucks, Hyatt, and SeaWorld have phased them out, too.
The entire UK has followed suit. England's ban on single-use plastic straws, stirrers, and cotton buds came into effect on October 1, 2020. The ban makes it illegal for businesses to sell or supply these items in shops, with the exception of pharmacies. However, catering establishments can still provide plastic straws to customers who request them.
The ban is part of the government's efforts to reduce single-use plastic waste and protect the environment and oceans. It is intended to help cut litter and prevent plastic pollution from polluting streets and threatening wildlife. As of January 22, 2024, there are also restrictions on the online and over-the-counter sales and supply of the following single-use plastic items: Plates, Bowls, Trays, Straws, Cotton buds.
However, plastic bans are not yet universal, and Americans still consume about a credit card’s worth of microscopic plastic pieces a week. Ewwwwe.
If the environment is not your jam, perhaps your health is. we are now searching for those microscopic pieces of plastic in the hope of eliminating them as well. For example, Tide pods are about to be outlawed in California because the outer casing of every tide pod is a single use plastic. Yes, the pod disintegrates in your washing machine, but where do you think it goes then?
Into your clothing, to be absorbed through the skin? Into the city water supply, where you can drink it?
Even liquid Tide still comes in a plastic container. Eliminating plastic containers won’t be easy.
A paper that got a lot of publicity this week examined over 300 carotid artery endarterectomy patients and found serious amounts of plastic in their arteries. Worse yet, it also found that patients with microplastics and nanoplastics in their carotid artery plaque had a higher risk of death or major cardiovascular events. “After a mean follow-up of 34 months, patients in whom microplastics and nanoplastics were detected within the atheroma had a 4.5 times higher risk for the composite endpoint of all cause death, myocardial infarction, or stroke than those in whom these substances were not detected (hazard ratio, 4.53; 95% CI, 2.00-10.27; P < .001).
Plastic has also been found in people’s livers and in breast milk.
The idea of microscopic plastic creeping into our bodies unbidden should be enough to make us stop to think about what we really need. In our house, we are eliminating all the plastic we can.