Design, Not Disaster: Navigating a plastic pandemic
By Deniz Dutton
December 23, 2020
As I open my eyes to a gorgeous Sunday morning in June, for a couple of brief, blissful seconds I am oblivious to the state of the world. I smile as I think about meeting up with my friends in the city later in the day. It feels like I haven’t seen them in forever. Then, as I yawn, stretch, and reach for my phone, reality hits me. The pandemic. It has been three months since the president announced a state of emergency due to COVID-19. Now, social distancing, masks, and loneliness are facts of life. On top of the profound changes it has brought to our cultural routine, COVID-19 has also had profound consequences for the environment.
During this pandemic, the conflict of interest between what is good for the environment and what protects human health has emerged as a major theme. Initially, the impact of the pandemic on the environment was projected to be a positive one. As humanity huddled in their homes, rarely-seen animals returned to urban centers. For a time, greenhouse gas emissions dropped globally to a level never seen since before World War II, according to the Global Carbon Project. It seems the pandemic did what five years of the Paris Accord could not. Power plants and industrial facilities halted their production activities in response to lowered economic demand, and people everywhere stopped driving their cars since they had nowhere to go. In the months after China went into lockdown, levels of nitrogen oxide and particulate matter in the air declined significantly, according to a thorough analysis conducted by the media platform Carbon Brief. In March, researchers at Stanford looked into the health benefits of the reduced industrial activity in China. “The reductions in air pollution in China caused by this economic disruption likely saved twenty times more lives in China than have currently been lost due to infection with the virus in that country,” said Marshall Burke, associate professor in Stanford’s Department of Earth System Science. The environmental silver linings were bright and clear at first, but faded as countries attempted to return to normalcy too soon.
As Congress passed stimulus packages and the economy began to pick up again, a perfect storm of already-problematic waste management systems and increased consumption of disposable goods meant the end of nature’s honeymoon phase. National lockdowns led to an increase in online shopping and takeout food orders, generating massive amounts of plastic and other solid waste from the commercial and residential sector. This waste is only beginning to be quantified.
When I returned to college at the University of Vermont for the first time in sixth months, my lifestyle changed dramatically—instead of walking and taking the bus, I was now driving everywhere, getting more meals to-go, and ordering more packages. Others I asked said that their habits had also changed since the onset of the pandemic.
“Because I can’t sit with all my friends in the dining hall and the atmosphere isn’t as pleasant as it used to be, I find myself buying a lot more pre-packaged meals from [the dining halls],” said Ella, a UVM sophomore. “I just think about where [the trash] is going, how long it’s going to be around, and it’s so scary that it’s going to be there forever,” she said.
Although some fret about the effect of our individual consumer choices on the environment, we must also remember that the options we are confronted with are the result of the decisions of the institutions we are part of; it doesn’t all boil down to whether you chose the apple or bag of chips.
Ultimately, whether or not we recycle doesn’t matter as much as we are made to believe it does; the whole concept of recycling was invented by the plastic industry to avoid having to go extinct. Sensing that plastic was falling out of favor during the environmental movement of the seventies, the plastic industry launched a massive campaign to portray plastics as something that could be recycled like paper and glass. Today, only about 8 percent of plastic is recycled in the United States, in contrast with the 68 percent reclamation rate of paper. This percentage is propped up by two types of plastics that have the most recycling potential—PET and HDPE—meaning that the vast majority of plastic products have no recycling potential at all. Companies continue to churn out complex plastic packaging without regard for the limits of our ailing recycling facilities. In essence, there is nothing Ella, I, or almost anyone can do individually to reduce our impact in a large-scale, meaningful way—for that, we need swift, systemic change.
Our waste management system is broken. Worldwide, only sixteen percent of plastics get recycled; the vast majority end up in landfills, according to a study done by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation in 2017. This percentage is projected to decrease this year as oil prices have plummeted and the price of virgin plastics has become more competitive with recycled plastic, making the incentives for recycling plastic even less effective. In 2018, China’s “National Sword” Policy banned the import of recycled material from the United States, throwing a wrench in our recycling system and decimating the market value of recycled goods. Since then, recyclable materials have been piling up in warehouses and landfills. Compounding this challenge, recycling centers are not operating at their full potential due to reduced staffing during the pandemic, and many municipalities across the U.S. have dropped their recycling collection services. Unless we want to deal with a plague of plastic pollution after this plague is over, some preemptive investment in better recycling practices is in order.
The hyper-hygienic way of life that we have adopted since the pandemic began is to blame for the increase in plastic usage and suspension of recycling programs. Despite evidence to the contrary being available, single-use plastics are still perceived as being the most effective barrier against bacteria and viruses. According to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine earlier this year, the novel coronavirus can survive on plastic for three days; it can survive on paper for only three hours, cardboard for one day and cloth for two days. Despite this knowledge being available, single-use plastics are still widely being used in the name of sanitation. It’s no wonder—the Plastics Industry Association has lobbied successfully to repeal bans on plastics and has experienced an increase in profits based on this misinformation. Many businesses have put new rules in place banning reusable bags this year, with the approval of numerous state and local governments. These bans are going into effect despite a recent report collaborated on by 100 scientists from 18 countries finding that reusable bags do not increase the chance of virus transmission.
Ocean Conservancy scientists worry that if temporary bans on reusable bags last too long, the additional plastic entering the environment will be devastating for marine life. According to the nonprofit, plastic bags are consistently one of the top 10 most common items found on beaches and are one of the most deadly pollutants in the ocean. Fortunately, these bans are beginning to be repealed, but the habits of consumers may be affected for some time.
Single-use personal protective equipment (PPE), particularly masks, are new on the scene and are infiltrating the environment in massive quantities. Masks are made of layers of polymers combined with other materials; this lack of homogeneity makes them extremely difficult to recycle. If they end up in the environment, like any other plastic product, these masks will not break down for thousands of years. In addition, animals can get caught in the ear loops of masks and perish. According to a report from the World Wildlife Fund this year, “if just 1 percent of the masks were disposed of incorrectly and dispersed in nature, this would result in as many as 10 million masks per month polluting the environment.” This influx of human-made material into the environment will affect wildlife for at least decades to come.
Although medical professionals may require traditional PPE in order to make their jobs as sanitary as possible, for the general public, reusable cloth masks are sufficient, according to the CDC. Reusing masks can help stem the amount of waste entering the environment. Even though cloth is more biodegradable than plastic, make sure to hold on to yours as long as possible, and wash it often.
The World Health Organization has called for a forty percent increase in the manufacturing of plastics to meet the rising global demand. They also recommend that PPE and other single-use items be incinerated as the most sanitary form of disposal. However, incineration is a risky process. If not done properly, it releases toxic gases that are deadly to humans along with greenhouse gases like methane, which traps heat in the atmosphere at a higher rate than carbon dioxide does. According to a 2015 study by the World Energy Council, the incineration of plastics accounts for 16 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually and is projected to increase to 91 million tons by 2050 as the population grows and demand for plastic increases.
In addition to physically ending up in the environment and wreaking havoc on wildlife, plastics contribute significantly to climate change, and the pandemic is causing them to have an even greater impact. The thoughtless production of this cheap material on which our civilization depends so heavily must be brought to an end. The act of producing plastics in the name of managing a public health crisis is paradoxical; doing so only ensures a future public health crisis from food and water shortages, heat waves, and rising sea levels.
We can fix this broken system. The MacArthur Foundation found that a shift to a circular economy would reduce carbon emissions by forty-four percent by 2050. To improve the recyclability of materials, the industry as well as policy-makers must pay attention to the base design of products and the raw materials used to make them. Plastics do not need to be taken entirely out of the picture; the German chemical company BASF has shown that they are a valuable source of low-carbon fuel when incinerated correctly and can help reduce reliance on virgin fossil fuels. Bioplastics are another solution; they are growing in the market but need industrial-grade composters in order to fully biodegrade. Therefore, waste management infrastructure and technology need to keep pace with breakthroughs in material design. Better cooperation between the production and disposal aspects of the commodity chain, especially in regards to plastics, will put us on a path to long term sustainability and directly deal with the major environmental externalities of infectious disease control.
Plastic pollution and the pandemic both stem from the same basic idea that the environment is separate from us; and efforts to combat both issues are all battles in the war on the endless growth mindset that has driven Western global economies since the Industrial Revolution. When we understand our responsibility to the earth and other living things and reevaluate our values as a society, then sustainability will be within reach.
The concept of Earth Overshoot Day, created by Global Footprint Network, is a metric for understanding our ability to sustain ourselves into the future. This day marks the point in the calendar year at which humanity has used up its resource budget for the year. After that date, we are operating in overshoot. This year, the date came later than it has for several decades— August 22nd, in contrast with July 29th the previous year— speculated to be caused by the reduced economic activity as a result of the pandemic. Still, this year we have been supported by 1.6 earths. It should only take one earth to sustain us in any scenario.
It’s not just about plastic. The pandemic has pit human health against the health of the environment, yet these two concepts are bound to one another. The mutual thriving of humanity and the rest of nature is the key to preventing future pandemics. We need a new perspective on what it means to be a human in the world— not an individual, but part of a greater, interdependent whole that includes non-human beings. It’s time to push that Earth Overshoot Day to December 31st— and this time by design, not disaster.
