NOVELTIES KNOW NO BOUNDS

This week, we are all about trash-talking and trying to avoid feeding those ravenous landfills.

Rivers and Roads

Back in the fall, I walked in the front door to my parent’s house after being away for nine months, and one of the first things my dad says is, “Your mom has gone crazy with the recycling.” He then points over to the back kitchen area, where there is a wall of different bags and a few boxes with labels and numbers on them. This was not news to me, but it stands out in my dad’s mind as the most notable activity he needs to catch me up on after being gone for so long. I laugh and say that if he is looking for condolences, he’s talking to the wrong person.

My mom (and dad reluctantly) sort plastics, even to the extent of washing cereal box liners and candy wrappers, and return them to a recycling center, where they could get reused, bought as art supplies, or sent to a partner organization to be turned into decking. The sorting is admirable. It is also extra work. To my parent’s credit, they together have kept up with sorting plastics that do not get collected by the city recycling program for multiple years now. By taking the time to manage their waste, they not only save material from landfilling but also become more conscious of what they are disposing of and are more likely to weigh that when purchasing items.

There’s the rub. Landfilling things is really easy. Out of sight, out of mind. Not in my backyard. *Insert another cliche about garbage*. We are completely disconnected from the amount of things we waste. By reconnecting and increasing the time and monetary cost of disposing of items, we become more incentivized to use less. 

The past few weeks, we have been working in the beautiful Bryce Canyon and Zion national parks and promoting the Zero Landfill Initiative. This initiative is to reduce the amount of solid waste going to landfills from our National Parks and so far has sent funds to help Yosemite, Grand Teton and Denali reduce their waste. When people flock to spend time in our most beautiful natural spaces, we don’t want it to come at the cost of other ecosystems. So, we teach solutions. In the parks, solutions include increasing access to water filling stations for reusable water bottles, implementing composting capabilities, refiling stove propane canisters, working with concessionaires to sell items that minimize packaging waste sent to landfills, and educating staff and visitors on how to bring less material in and what can be composted and recycled. 

We are the only animal that knows plastic is what it is. We know that it is not edible and that it breaks down into smaller pieces. We know that it can suffocate small children. We actively protect our small children from plastic dangers like closing themselves in plastic bins or putting bags over their heads by staying vigilant. But there is no one to teach animals the dangers of plastic. I am not sure how long it takes for animals to adapt to novel entities and materials, but I am sure that they can't keep up with the thousands of new compounds that we produce each year. 

Plastic waste is one of those things that makes me angry, frustrated, and sad all at the same time because there is no clear fix-all solution. At this point in time, we do not have the technology to act in our best interest scenario. Prohibiting plastic use entirely diminishes the incredible technological feats we have made because of it. Saying we need to recycle all plastic glosses over the fact that it is more expensive and energy-intensive in some cases to process and recycle than making it from fossil fuels. And continuing to make plastic from fossil fuels ignores the looming limitations on a nonrenewable resource that emits huge amounts of carbon dioxide.

Plastic is made to last. So the best thing we can do is use the same plastic for the duration of its usefulness, often hundreds of years, rather than landfilling it. What my parents do is noble work. The biggest hurdle to recycling is sorting—the variety of types, forms, and cleanliness is more than many recycling systems can handle. My parent's effort almost guarantees that the material will get used again. It also shows that they are thinking about the future and the world that we may live in after they are gone. How kind!

Hot Topic

IT’S ME (A NOVEL ENTITY), I’M THE PROBLEM IT’S ME

If you think you know what plastic is you can probably skip this section, but let me just say, I thought I knew until researching this week and found there to be major holes I needed to fill in. The first thing I realized was that I didn’t know what plastic is actually made of. (Like I knew it was made of chemicals that were really strong when put together, but… from there it was fuzzy)

Plastic polymers are made of long strings of monomers attached to each other. The strength of the bonds between monomers is what makes some plastics last forever and be incredibly harmful and pervasive in our environment. But what are these monomers? Some plastics are made from ethylene or styrene, both of which are molecules that can be found in some fruits and vegetables but are mass produced from fossilized petroleum products. Too bad the plastics made with these (i.e. PET and Styrofoam) have some of the strongest bonds and will not break back down naturally into their monomers if left outside. Other plastics are made from entirely synthetic monomers (like Vinyl Chloride to make PVC piping, and acrylonitrile to make acrylic fabrics and tiles), and can break down in the environment (i.e. with UV exposure) but become incredibly toxic when they do so. Compared to natural polymers like our DNA, silk, wool, and cellulose, these synthetic materials need to be managed and contained in entirely human systems. And we are doing a very, very poor job at this containment (see train crashes leaking Vinyl Chloride, or plastics spills).

The other problem with plastics and other novel entities that have been synthesized in the last 50 years is that we invent new ones far faster than we can feasibly monitor their toxicity and human health impacts or create adequate waste management… but we’ll get to that later. For now, here are a handful of resources to help turn you into a plastic savant!

• Here are 14 common plastics types that eventually end up in the ocean. 

• Only 9% of plastic gets recycled. Dive deep into the data of our plastic waste and see how the US compares to the rest of the world here. 

• Just because the plastic has a number and a little triangle made of three arrows does not mean it can or will be recycled when put in a recycle bin. Check out the best explanation of the plastic numbers I have ever found here.

Novel entities and plastics helped reduce the pressure to use ivory and horn as strong but malleable materials. Still, they have become an enormous chemical consumption problem facing the 21st century, with a great need for testing and study.

Things You Didn’t Notice

PLASTIC’S NO NAME

Plastic is about as specific of a term as metal is for all the metals. It is actually such a limiting and misleading gap in language when it comes to teaching and talking about plastics. What we are left with are these horrifically over complicated technical science terms for the materials that no one ever remembers correctly. Who is going to distinguish their polyethylene terephthalate bottle? No, it's a plastic bottle. Or acrylonitrile butadiene styrene helmet? You have got to be kidding. It’s plastic.

As part of my job, I often ask people how long they think various common litter items take to break down. They often get confused because the answer for disposable diapers is different from nylon clothing, monofilament fishing lines, or plastic bottles. They are all different plastics with different properties. But people hear plastic and think it’s all the same. Some people immediately guess forever for all of them, which is not too far off the mark for our fossil fuel-based plastics. But others guess ten years for all of them. This poses a marketing problem regarding “bioplastics” or PLA, a theoretically compostable plastic. How would another plastic be better if they all just last forever, or be needed if plastic already breaks down in ten years? Plastic is too general a term.

Language shifts based on what is important in a culture. The applications and use cases of plastics are increasingly being discussed. What if we had terms to group plastics based on use cases rather than the material’s chemical composition? Let’s try.

Oilids are solid oils or plastics that are generally single-use and do not get recycled. They end up polluting our environment and filling up the landfills. Oilids are currently used for things like fishing lines, disposable diapers, wrappers, and much of our fast fashion. Oilids are bad, and we want to get rid of them through divestment, public pressure, and policy. 

Mobios are the types of plastic that are designed for single-use and will break down back into natural proteins and monomers that the environment can handle. PLA is a type of mobio as well as much of the seaweed based packaging that is coming to the market. Mobios fill the need for innovative, lightweight, single-use packaging and intensively used items like shoe soles and fishing nets that get discarded after a certain time anyway.

Benestics are plastics made from ethylene or styrene that are well-known, pure, simple, and made to last. Benestics can and must be recycled with systems in place to keep these materials in a waste-free circular economy. Benestics are the plastics that are used for machinery and building. They are used repeatedly in the form they are in. We need benestics to promote our clean energy transition, transportation innovation, and infrastructure.

Haztics are hazardous plastics. Simple enough. With all our material innovations, it is baffling that we tolerate haztics in the form of BPA-ridden polycarbonate bottles, PVC pipes made from highly toxic vinyl chloride, or PFAS-coated cookware. These materials are deeply rooted in our society and used in products that can otherwise last a long time, but because they are made with haztics, need to be substituted with benestics. 

Novents is a category of materials for which we feel we do not have comprehensive data or management practices. This can refer to oilids, haztics, and mobios, but also materials that we do not know what category they lie in. Novents are DANGEROUS. And must be limited. I cannot express this enough. There is much that we do not know, so it is better to default into assuming it is harmful until proven harmless.

“Novel entities” are considered a planetary boundary that was deemed to be crossed after the first scientific assessment in 2023. But how do we assess something that we, by definition of them being novel entities, know very little about?

This is the question brought up by Linn M. Persson’s team. Persson evaluated various metrics upon which we can measure and evaluate the risks of novel entities by judging their relevance, feasibility, and comprehensiveness. TLDR: No metric does it all. Categorically, we could base our assessment on the production, release, or ecological impact of novents. While the feasibility and comprehensiveness of basing our risks and goals on the production of novents are high because we have systems in place to measure that already, the relevance to our earth systems is low. Contrarily, weighing our risks and goals on the measured ecological impact of novents would have high relevance but is very limited in its feasibility and comprehensiveness because we’d need to measure every combination of novent and ecological process at many different scales.

As it stands, this planetary boundary is more of a societal boundary–one that emphasizes that we as a society should not tolerate the wide use of chemicals and materials of which we do not know the safety. There are an estimated 350,000 chemicals registered for production and one third of them are not publicly identified because they are proprietary. The production of chemicals is 50 times greater than in 1950 and is still estimated to triple by 2050 compared to 2010. Assessment of these entities cannot keep up at this rate. 

Not to freak you out, but if you are an average consumer looking around your house, you may think, “Well, sure, I don’t exactly know what a lot of this stuff is made out of…it’s just plastic. The people producing these things know all about the stuff and what it does.” But the truth is, for so many plastics, those experts only know how to make it cheaply—not what it does…entirely. 

We need language to talk about plastics so that it isn’t this vague, confusing thing that we pass off responsibility for. We, producers and consumers, need to push to eliminate haztics and oilids, and further develop mobios. We need to prevent all benestics from ending up as waste, because they can be used for long durations and eventually recycled. Finally, we need to recognize novents, for what they are–materials that have not been around for long enough to know they are safe. Let’s hit the brakes on developing novents faster than we can do our due diligence to make sure they are a good addition to the world.

I love to make up words. But did you catch my meaning? If you did, even just a little… it’s working!

Refresh

• Health: We can not overcome our plastic obsession PFAS(t) enough. This article breaks down how novel entities have affected us way faster than those plastics could ever dream of breaking down.

• Household: What’s in a pan? Some nonstick chemicals seem to cause health problems if we look at them incorrectly! I have told myself that I will not scratch that pan. Oh, how naive I was. This article dives into the nuances of nonstick PFAS in cookware and provides some alternatives. The compounds we know the most about are being phased out because of their health concerns, leading us to use new ones that we do not know the repercussions of (...a tale as old as Bakelite). 

• Transportation: The treasures you can find on the side of the road! When traveling at 60+ mph, it is easy to overlook the loads of garbage that line our roads. But, the amount of litter on road sides can cost states millions of dollars to clean up. Slow down and take a look (I am amazed by what wonders I see when biking). The faster the speed limit, the more trash needed to be noticed and the more dangerous it is to pick up. Read this story of a city grappling with trashed roadsides. 

• Mentality: We have made materials that are uniquely strong AND pliable. How can we be strong and pliable in our everyday lives and conversations?

• Community: It seems like everyone knows that plastic waste is a problem. So it’s time to team up to do something about it. We are going to be stronger in numbers. Check out these organizations taking tangible steps to reduce the plastic load on our environment: Alliance to End Plastic Waste, Plastic Pollution Coalition, Litterati, rePurpose, 4Ocean, and the US Plastic Pact.

Mouthwatering

SQISHY

Would you eat plastic? Well, there is a new category of material being developed—edible packaging (a mobio!) that takes the place of oilids and is produced from plant sources such as algae and seaweed. 

AND they are SO CUTE. I just want to squeeze some ketchup out of one of these packets so bad. 

NotPLA is one of a couple of companies that specialize in edible packaging or packaging that could be eaten even if it doesn’t taste great.

Game Time

Time to see where you stand.

Perform an audit and record what plastics you use and what you throw away over the course of a day. See if you can audit multiple days. Here is a printable sheet or electronic version. I’d love to hear what patterns emerge.

For me, food wrappers make up a large portion of my waste. While I am trying to make better purchasing decisions, they still build up. Since wrappers are hard to recycle, there is only one solution I have found so far. That is making ecobricks!

As for the other materials we dispose of, if you are wary about the real impact of recycling, check out this quick fact list and know that recycling paper, glass, and aluminum already makes a world of difference.