By 2050, a total of 34 billion tons of plastic will be produced if the world’s plastic production continues to increase as rapidly as it has in the first 15 years of the 21st century. (Graphic text in Dutch: miljoen = millions; miljard = billions.) Graphic courtesy of Plastic Soup Foundation
Once in a while I run across a survey invitation from someone or the Maine Climate Council and fill it out. Not very often, but sometimes. I answer the questions truthfully, which is the only way anything makes any sense. To me, at least.
Usually there is a question asking something like, “What issue are you most concerned about?” and offering a list of concerns. I always answer: climate change. Incredibly, sometimes climate change is not on the list, so I have to check “other.”
I get a similar feeling when I go to the recycling center. At our house we used to accumulate recycling stuff at a rate that meant a trip every two or three months. In the last few years, I have a carload about every four or five weeks.
It is incredible to me that we are making more trash now than we were 20 years ago. Shouldn’t we be making less?
Another incredible factoid from the recycling center is something Jeff Reynolds and Steve Wright, who run our eight-town Unity Area Regional Recycling Center in Thorndike, told me: Only about 30% of the recyclable trash in our area gets recycled. The CIA got better results from its remote-viewing experiments.
Last year a Washington Post reporter visited the center for a story on the Legislature’s effort to shift some of the costs of recycling from taxpayers to manufacturers. The Extended Producer Responsibility law passed this year. It will spend five years getting implemented before it does anything. Meanwhile, the Post reporter explained in detail how recycling efforts are getting more difficult. The center in Trenton had basically quit recycling. The Unity recycling center is one of a scant few in Maine that accepts anything like the whole range of plastics, Reynolds told me.
Even then, a delicate, detailed, exasperating sorting process is involved. It starts with rinsing out your containers, which probably stops most of that nonrecycling 70% before they even start. The Unity center takes plastics No. 1-7, but 1, 2 and 3 through 7 have to be separated. There are three kinds of No. 2. No. 1 clear plastic can look and feel like No. 3. Some packaging is not recyclable even though it has a number. And what’s that braille-like figure inside the tiny triangle anyway? Why isn’t there a phone app to decode those numbers? It’s exasperating for all concerned. Which encourages no one to join in.
My own home recycling project suggests packaging manufacturers are going out of their way to design combinations of materials that cannot be recycled at all. Paper-plastic-foil potato chip bags are not recyclable. You just have to chuck them in the trash to go along with the other 70% of everything that’s filling up a dump in Norridgewock. The question is not whether someday the dump might fill up. The question is: How soon? And then what?
More incredible is that recycling isn’t even the solution to the problem. It’s like plugging a leak with a rag. Practically every plastic cup, lid, jar, bottle, bag ever made (from oil, by the way) over the past 80 years or so is still here on Earth in some form. Every cup, lid, bottle, etc., that will be made next year, and the year after, will also remain.
The solution is to stop making plastic. And yet, more incredibly, more plastic was produced between 2000 and 2010 than was produced in the whole 20th century.
And that’s just plastic pollution. Higher heat has been happening every summer for years.
This August was the second-hottest on record in Portland, third-hottest in Bangor. Water sources are drying up, forests are burning, crop yields are down out west due to severe drought. One-third of Pakistan flooded this summer after extraordinary weather that’s melting glaciers and disrupting rain patterns. There is practically unanimous agreement among scientists that the heat rise is caused by humans burning oil. (Sorry, studies made 30 years ago based on incomplete data and disproven premises do not count as descriptions of reality.) “It is unequivocal that climate change has already disrupted human and natural systems,” the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated in its 2022 report.
But incredibly, we continue to puke huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Heating things up. More.
A worldwide disaster is gaining momentum right now. It’s going to get worse in the next hundred years no matter what we do. But if we do nothing, it’s going to create a “century of hell,” as environmental reporter David Wallace-Wells put it, for our great-great-grandchildren. For me, every other problem pales in comparison to the danger my grandson is in. The biggest problem with the effort to overthrow the government is that its success would permanently doom the environment.
Climate disaster can only be averted collectively. Individuals, organizations, businesses, governments have to work on it together.
So if you have even an inkling that climate change is a problem, you’ll want to think carefully about who you vote for. Some politicians not only resist effort to stop the world from filling up with smoke and plastic, they’re openly hostile to it.
Of interest, for example, is the Maine Republican Party platform for 2022. It mentions the word “climate” just once — in the phrase “business climate.” It mentions the word “environment” three times — in connection to implicit and explicit worries about environmental regulations that might get in the way of making money.
Business climate and prudence in regulations are important. But climate change is so much larger a problem that it will, if unattended, wash out not only shoreline communities, but most bank accounts along with them.
Sen. Angus King’s statement excoriating the Supreme Court’s decision to limit EPA enforcement of carbon emissions mentions “our sacred responsibility to protect our country and our planet for future generations.” He uses the word “sacred” in an authentically biblical sense: God charges humans with “dominion” over the Earth, the word “dominion” clearly obliging us to care for the Earth, not wreck it.
Thank God we are not handing out plastic bags at grocery stores any more. But it’s incredible to me that plastic and oil are still driving us to hell.
Dana Wilde lives in Troy. You can contact him at dwilde.naturalist@gmail.com. His book “Winter: Notes and Numina from the Maine Woods” is available from North Country Press. Backyard Naturalist appears the second and fourth Thursdays each month.
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