The real three ‘R’s

During my first beach-clean, had the opportunity to learn something new about the nature of plastic pollution. I learned that not only is plastic ‘die-hard’ but it goes through various stages in its life, each one presenting new dangers to the last. My findings led me to develop a new perspective of how we should really tackle the crisis. It started practically the minute I had walked on to the beach.

In my naivety, I had targeted a relatively clean beach which perhaps fell down the priority list of beaches that you would think needed cleaning. For this I’m now glad, because I may not have come to the same conclusions had I targeted a heavily littered beach.

I expected to find a lot of the typical items such as bottles, containers and bags, but no such items seem to catch the eye. Just before before walking off to find a new beach, I decided to look a bit closer.

As I got my eye in, I started to notice loads of smaller pieces and shards hidden in the strand line. These pieces tended to be in the range of about ten centimetres down to five millimetres. The more I looked the more I found, until it became apparent that the beach was littered with them. My so-called ‘clean beach’ was actually covered in plastic its just that the pieces were so small that they fell below my unconscious attention. Incredibly I very quickly managed to filled a couple of buckets. 

This occurrence opened my eyes to a principle that I had been missing. If I had struggled to see the pieces, it’s likely that the vast majority of people miss them too. Could it be that the larger items (bottles, bags), were missing because they were ‘noticeable’ and cleared off the beach by passers by? Did the smaller pieces remain because they existed in a state of relative invisibility? 

I then began to realise a concerning truth. Surely that which is invisible to us, would be very visible to the smaller coastal species that inhabit these beaches. My mind reverted back the images of dead sea birds i had seen on TV with their stomachs full of plastic. The pieces I was finding were a very close match in size.  

Let’s face it, few animals will choke on something the size of a plastic bottle. Although we need to clear these items I thought to myself, its the smaller pieces that were really ‘on the menu’. Could the visible waste be taking priority and perhaps blinding us to the real danger. 

My thought process continued. It was not only the very large that was missing, it was also the very small. I found no pieces smaller than 5mm, meaning they were probably to small to be seen amongst the sand grains. 

This led to my second disturbing realisation. It means that the smaller plastic becomes, the less likely we can/will do anything about it. It simply gets too small to exist in the human dimension. 

We are accustomed to ‘dealing’ with plastic items when they are big enough to hold in our hand. If we can see the waste, we become aware that something needs to be done about it (and hopefully dispose of it correctly). 

If we cannot see the waste, it likely passes from our awareness and we become inclined loose our perception on the problem. This is precisely the point however that plastic begins to do its damage. 

What’s worse is that a plastics life spent in the human dimension is only a small fraction of the total life of a plastic, meaning it is spending the vast majority of its existence doing untold damage at a scale we simply do not see. 

Plastic does not biodegrade or ‘break-down’ into natural compounds. Rather it ‘breaks-up’ into smaller and smaller pieces that will exist on this planet for hundreds if not thousands of years. Once they get small enough to be termed micro-plastics (less the 5mm) they can become consumed by micro-organisms. The micro-plastics then enter the food chains to which we sit above. The irony is that we are ultimately re-acquainted with that which we throw away.

What then? Well for us it’s likely to cause all kinds of diseases the likes of which we have the pleasure of finding out about in the near future. For plastic however the journey has barely begun. It will pass out our bodies and back in to the waterways to continue its rampage for hundreds more years. 

To make matters worse, plastic production has accelerated exponentially in recent times and there is currently no environmentally friendly way of ending its life. This means that if production does not slow down there will come a point where plastic will contribute to the the make-up of every living thing on planet Earth, slowly poisoning this world from the inside out. 

I concluded that once plastic has been produced there was nothing in practice we could do to control it, and certainly not for its entire lifespan. Maintaining its ‘usefulness’ may keep it within our dimension for a period, but eventually it would pass beyond our gaze and begin its true damage. The best we can hope for, is to delay the inevitable.  

 And here I get to my point.

The three ‘R’s

The three ‘R’s Reduce, Reuse, Recycle are entering the human consciousness as the right philosophy for dealing with plastic. But is it? 

Once plastic is conceived nothing short of incineration will get rid of it (don’t get me started on that little gem). In short, once it is here, its here to stay. 

There is therefore no solution for the problem post-production, there is only management. Solutions can only exist in the pre-production space. In other words the one thing we can do to stop plastic damaging this world is to stop it entering the world in the first place. 

The crisis requires pro-activity not reactivity. 

The first ‘R’ operates in the this proactive, pre-production space. It serves to lower production again and again and again until it will eventually stop. ‘Reduction’ is therefore a viable solution to the crisis. 

The second two ‘R’s are post-production. They are therefore not viable solutions they are management at best. I will make the case that not only is this management irrelevant it is also counter-productive to the first ‘R’.

Re-using and Recycling play their part in the perpetuation of plastic production to the point where-by any short term reduction they may cause, is vastly outweighed by the long term continuations in production to which they contribute. 

They may also be key contributors to the fragmentation of plastics in to smaller and smaller pieces and thus offer us no more ‘management’ than that which the ocean or the weather can do for us. 

Let’s be clear, reusing and recycling does not get rid of plastic, they just maintain its usefulness or change it from one incarnation to another. Plastic will have its full lifespan and will pass out of our sight eventually. It matters little that it spends a small proportion of its life getting reused or recycled by us.

If you like, the second two ‘R’s simply represent ways of keeping the plastic in our sights. As I spoke earlier, if it is in our sight it is in our awareness and we feel like we have a handle on the problem. But this is blinding us to the truth. All we are effectively doing is ‘watching it’ for longer, but neither reusing not recycling is effective enough for us to ‘watch it’ for very long.

Let’s first consider re-usability. At first thought one might conclude, if I am re-using an item, then I am delaying myself buying another and therefore working on my reduction. You may have reduced your personal consumption, but you have done little to reduce long term plastic production. The item will eventually be discarded and you will eventually buy another resulting further contributions to long term plastic production. 

Any short term reductions in personal consumption is outweighed by the long perpetuation of plastic production you have contributed to. 

It’s the mentality that comes with the word ‘reuse’. It’s likely that the thought of reusing the item made you feel that it was ok to buy it. The mentality of reduce, prevents us from buying it in the first place. 

Most single use items are simply not designed to be used more than once. Even with the best of intentions these items will crack and fray after just a few uses. Even the most re-usable items will eventually loose their usefulness and will be destined for the trash. 

In practice, only a few plastic items will ever get reused and of those that do, few will offer periods of usefulness that will have any impact on the full life of the plastic. 

What’s worse is that the act of reusing typically creates ware and mechanical damage which inadvertently breaks the plastic up. Depressingly, the forces at work within a busy kitchen are probably more abrasive than that of the ocean which really does defeat the purpose.

I have come to realise that just because we are still finding a plastic item ‘useful’ doesn’t mean we have prevented any damage. We may actually be contributing to it.

One might say at this point “ahh but we have the last ‘R’ to fall back on, anything past its usefulness can be picked up by the recycling system. 

This ‘R’ I’m afraid is worse than the last. Recycling is a problem because of its shear ineffectiveness. Worldwide, only 9% of all plastics have ever been recycled, meaning that 12% of it still exists as its original form (albeit in bits) somewhere on the planet. Don’t be fooled by the high percentages pushed out by first world governments, they can only quote recycling collection figures. What they don’t tell you what has happed to the plastic after it has been collected

As we are just beginning to find out the vast majority of our waste is getting shipped to third world countries that struggle to recycle their own waste. The painful truth here is that what we think we are recycling is highly likely to be dumped on third world land fill sites. As far as our governments are concerned, once it has left our border it is no longer our problem but this must change.  

For years we have been blaming the plastic crisis on Asia for their poor recycling infrastructure when in actual fact the vast majority of that waste is ours. A new study published in Science Advances in 2020 shows that the UK and the US are actually the biggest contributors to plastic waste per capita. The lie that recycling is somewhat effective once again cons us into believing there are post-production solutions and that it is ok to buy some plastic. 

Even the most environmentally conscious people become complacent with a little bit of plastic in their lives because they feel that there is always the recycling bin to forgiven them of their sins. This complacency however, no matter how small keeps plastic in production.

But here’s the rub. Even if recycling was more effective, so what? Most plastic can only really be recycled once before it looses quality, meaning once again recycling is no more than a short lived way of keeping the plastic in our sight, as always, it will eventually pass on to the realms beyond our dimension. 

Just as with the second ‘R’, recycling adds much to this break up. The ineffectiveness and bad management of our recycling systems mean we are practically spoon feeding it to our sea-life.  

Final thoughts 

Only when we are standing on the edge of the precipice do we begin to move back. Where it comes to plastic pollution we are already on the edge, we just don’t see it. I believe the acts of reusing and recycling maybe blinding us to that fact. 

The second two ‘R’s are counterproductive to the first, but on a more optimistic note, the first ‘R’ absolves the need for the second two. You have no need to manage a problem you have not created. 

The answer may be to stop reusing and recycling all together. Maybe we need our lives to be so over-run with plastic that we finally open our eyes and see the problem. Maybe we need to stop giving our guilt a place to hide. 

Maybe we need to accept short term pain for long term gain. 

References 

• Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever made, Science Advances 2017, Roland Greyer et al
• The United States’ contribution of plastic waste to land and ocean, Science advances 2020 Kara Lavender Law et al.