Having plastic producers and the petrochemical industry pay for recycling

Who pays for plastic waste recycling and pollution remediation?

A question with a few answers.

First, setting the scene...

At the Zero Waste Conference on November 1, 2017, in Vancouver Canada, Mats Linder, Lead of the Innovation Programme for the New Plastics Economy at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation asked the audience to close our eyes and to think about all of the plastic items with which we interacted or used in the last 24 hours.

After giving us a few seconds to think about it he asked: “Now try to imagine what society will look like if these plastic items didn’t exist.”

This part of his presentation reminded me of the closing arguments of the movie A Time to Kill.

This is a story about petroleum based single-use, disposable plastics...

...walking home from the grocery store one sunny afternoon.

I want you to see yourself throwing a plastic bag with a plastic cup, lid and straw, a polystyrene foam container, plastic knife, fork and spoon, and a netted fruit bag made from nylon into an overflowing garbage can because there are no recycling bins on your city’ streets.

Suddenly a garbage truck races up. Two men empty the can into the truck.

The truck drives away...

...and without you ever knowing, it loses your plastic bag on its way to the landfill and the bag you used to carry your lunch for mere minutes, and all of the contents in it end up in a nearby river...

...and the river runs into the ocean...

...then sea animals and birds die from eating or getting tangled in your plastic waste…

While we live our busy, plastic filled lives of work and play, albatrosses feed your empty plastic packaging to their young, and a pilot whale carries her dead calf with her for days in mourning because her milk was made poisonous by the toxins absorbed and carried by your styrene foam food container.

First plankton, then coral, then oysters, mussels, lobsters, crabs, salmon, halibut, tuna, turtles, whales, and birds...

Please picture...                  

... over 700 species eating and breathing-in bits and pieces of that plastic you so responsibly tossed into the garbage because you trust the waste management system of your municipality…

Every year more than 100,000 turtles, marine mammals and seabirds suffocate and die painfully and slowly because of plastic waste while, at the very same time, we continue to buy single-use plastic products and products in single-use plastic packaging.

Can you see all those dead marine animals?

Now, try to imagine what society and the marine ecosystem will look like if these plastic items didn’t exist. Imagine if these throw-away, single-use, oil and gas derived plastic items didn’t exist.

Who pays for recycling?

According to a presenter at the Zero Waste Conference, the National Business Development & Sales Strategist of a company that has a very environmentally friendly tagline attached to its name, his company doesn’t pay for the recycling of their polystyrene foam trays and containers.

You see? Expanded Polystyrene, in particular, is horribly expensive to recycle, in part because of the very benefits that make it so attractive in the first place—because the material is 95 percent air, it’s incredibly bulky, and converting it back to its original form is challenging. This type of recycling doesn’t pay.

During our brief conversation, he asked me: Who is going to pay for recycling it?

When I answered that his company which are the manufacturers and distributors of polystyrene foam disposable packaging, has operations and clients worldwide and claims to be a "Naturally Green" circular business should pay for the recycling of its products, he explained that if the producer pays, then the price of the tray goes up for the consumer.

Jill McCutcheon, from Sedona Recycles in Arizona explains: “Processing one pallet of EPS results in a net loss of hundreds of dollars. Ideally, the producers of EPS packaging would take the responsibility for its disposal and recycling.

“It is estimated that EPS occupies up to 30% of all landfill space worldwide. (It is criminal) not to recover and recycle a material that is taking up so much space in the world’s landfills.”

Especially when every website you can visit about the material tells you that EPS is 100% recyclable.

Not only is this Canadian “Naturally Green” company not paying for the recycling of their product, he and his company are against the polystyrene foam bans sweeping across the globe and proposed for the City of Vancouver because they do not think it is the right solution.

Why in the world would any business recycle EPS and lose money?

The basic answer is simple, but it is very difficult for the plastic manufacturers and petrochemical companies to understand. Recycling EPS and single-use plastics, in general, is the right thing to do.

So, why doesn’t this “Naturally Green” Canadian company pay for the processing of their EPS products?

Answer number one is easy: The people whose big money-maker is the sale of polystyrene foam to-go containers and meat, poultry, and fruit and vegetable trays do not pay for polystyrene foam recycling because according to McCutcheon, “no one makes them pay for it.”

Answer number two is more involved: Oil and gas are multi-billion dollar businesses. According to a report -- compiled by Oil Change International and U.K. based think tank Overseas Development Institute, every year oil and gas producers in Canada get 3.3 Billion in tax breaks and handouts. In the United States, these subsidies amount to $20.5 billion annually.

The report also found that the G20 nations are spending approximately $452 Billion a year in oil and gas subsidies.

Petrochemical and plastic manufacturers make subsidized money producing materials with no end-of-life plan and those who process them get stuck with the bill.

Also, subsidies for Waste to Energy plants and landfilling help to outcompete materials recovery and recycling. 

Answer number three: If you live in Sedona Arizona and bought mushrooms from British Columbia Canada packaged on a foam tray wrapped in plastic film, you pay for the mushrooms, for the packaging and for the recycling.

Plastic manufacturers and petrochemical companies need to “understand the true cost of really recycling; that is, doing the whole job, not just the parts that make money.”

Bill Nye may have said it best in an interview with Business Insider, pointing out that we should get in the habit of conserving resources, even if the economics seem not to work.

"The less we waste, the more we have," he told BI.

Another presenter on Plastics at the Zero Waste Conference 2017 was Dr Richard Thompson, Professor of Marine Biology and Associate Dean, Research in the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Plymouth University.

Professor Thompson makes it very clear from the outset that (petro) plastics as materials are not the problem. He proposes to design plastics with end-of-life recyclability in mind and better stewardship of plastics as materials by moving towards certification to endorse the responsible use of plastics.

His idea is to join the end of life processors, those involved in collection, recovery, and recycling with the designers of plastic packaging and products in a certification scheme that links them together to create products or packaging that meet the demands of collection and recycling, then the designers’ plastics get an accreditation appointed to using recycled content and being recyclable at the end of their useful life to increase the flow of plastics in a circular way.

Three weeks before Professor Thompson presented his designer to end-of-life processor certification in Vancouver; on October 10 to 12, Francisco Paz, market development and value chain manager in the packaging and speciality plastics division of the Dow Chemical Company presented a session titled “Sustainable Innovations in Flexible Packaging” at the Cleaning Products US 2017 that took place in Alexandria, Virginia.

Due to the lack of durability relative to more traditional rigid home care packaging formats, manufacturers have been hesitant to adopt flexible packaging for some product categories. Paz noted that Dow Chemical is aiming to change this state of affairs with the launch of its proprietary PacXpert technology.

According to Paz, PacXpert material not only features reduced weight translating into reduced transportation costs and uses less energy to produce than rigid packaging, but it also offers durability that meets and even exceeds the standards of most rigid packaging formats commonly used in the home care industry today. 

One benefit that the PacXpert material does not provide, however, is recyclability.

Though flexible packaging formats do often use less energy to produce than rigid packaging, they are almost never recyclable. Additionally, flexible packaging is typically much more difficult to repurpose for other uses than rigid packaging is.

At the same event, in a session titled “Changing how People Think about Garbage and Recycling”, Tom Szaky, CEO of TerraCycle, spoke at length about ways in which home care manufacturers could better design their packaging to be recycled or reused while also speaking to the dangers of flexible packaging. 

So who pays for recycling this advanced, “sustainable” film packaging?

?Not Dow Chemical.

It is time for the plastics industry and its petrochemical suppliers worldwide to take responsibility for recycling what they produce.

Carlos Palafox-Ludlow, one of the founders of Enval, suggests, “We could better channel investment if we looked at the carbon locked up, and [the energy] .... it took to produce the item in the first place.”

Tom Szaky, co-founder of TerraCycle, the New Jersey Company that made its name tackling hard-to-recycle materials, suggests subsidies could help recyclers compete.

The governments of Rwanda, Kenya, and France have taken strong actions to seriously address the problem by curbing and prohibiting the use of single-use plastics and disposables.

The world awaits the UK Government’s decision to tax or impose other charges on single-use products and packaging made of plastic to tackle waste and help reduce the impact of plastic pollution on marine and bird life.

It is not just the animals in the ocean that are affected by plastic pollution but also every living thing.

Polar Bear With a Plastic Bag in His Mouth Tells Us About the Cost of Our Convenience | One Green Planet

These two reindeer lost their lives to an old fishing net. FOTO: Governor of Svalbard, Sweden.

Bear cub stuck in a plastic container.

The Plastics Industry can afford and must invest in solutions because it is massive and exceedingly polluting.

At 350 Billion euros in Europe, another 375 Billion dollars in the US, and 26.5 Billion dollars in Canada, this western industry triumvirate alone generates a total of 751.5 Billion combined Euros, US and Canadian dollars every year.

A recent report on the chemicals industry by CDP, Catalyst for Change, points out that plastics production is one of the industry’s highest greenhouse gas emitting processes, and more than a quarter of plastics production is used for packaging.

Plastic waste, one of the largest sources of environmental pollution is also the largest sources of carbon emissions. "The cost of after-use externalities for plastic packaging, plus the cost associated with greenhouse gas emissions from its production is conservatively estimated at $40 Billion annually."

Pollution caused by oil and gas plastic waste is killing millions of marine animals in each and all of the world’s oceans at a conservatively estimated financial damage to the tourism, shipping and fishing industries of US$13 Billion each year.

Ron Delia, Chief Executive Officer at AMCOR states, "Leadership in the global packaging industry includes accountability for helping to reduce the environmental and social effects of our business and our industry overall,"

I trust Mr Delia, petrochemical suppliers and the plastics industry will welcome a global cap and trade system for emission pollution and zero tolerance on plastic waste.

Cap and trade is the system that Canada and the U.S. successfully used to combat acid rain. Governments first set a "cap" or limit on the amount of pollution allowed.

With cap and trade, polluting companies, the plastics producers, the packaging manufacturers and their petrochemical supply chain, have to pay for every tonne of pollution by buying certified permits at a price that is set by market supply and demand.

Some studies have estimated that more than 150 million metric tonnes of plastics are currently in the ocean.

The Washington-based non-profit organization Ocean Conservancy has formed an alliance with partners that include the Trash Free Seas Alliance, Closed Loop Partners, PepsiCo, 3M, Procter & Gamble, the American Chemistry Council and the World Plastics Council to work on raising $150 million for a new funding mechanism to prevent plastic waste from Southeast Asia flowing into their oceans.

150 million metric tonnes of plastic in the ocean, USD $150 million investment plan for land-based recycling and waste management programs to prevent plastic waste from Southeast Asia leaking into the North Pacific and Indian Oceans.

Very symbolic... and NOT global.

“For decades, global corporations have managed to evade their responsibility for this worsening problem, leaving governments and taxpayers with the burden of dealing with the polluting legacy of their product packaging by locking us into cheap, disposable plastics, rather than innovating and finding real solutions,” said Abigail Aguilar, Campaigner for Greenpeace Southeast Asia.

Photo Credit: Miko Alino, GAIA Asia Pacific.

It is time for plastics producers and their petrochemical suppliers worldwide to pay their share on emission reduction costs, ocean and beach cleanup costs, for costs of maintaining marine reserves free of plastic pollution and for them to invest in developing infrastructure for plastics tracking, collection, sorting, separation, recycling, recovery, and in commercializing solutions to plastic pollution.

The first set "cap" or limit on the monetary amount the plastic producers and their petrochemical suppliers will have to pay will be $40 Billion a year for the first 5 years and $13 Billion a year from year six for another 5 years to cover such costs.

Companies that innovate and take responsibility for the recyclability of their products such as CeDo, the environmental leader in recycling capability, earn the right to sell permits and make money, while the others, like Dow Chemical, are required to pay.

The amount of money the industry has to pay will be reduced hand-in-hand as the amount of plastic waste and pollution on land and in the ocean reduces over time.

The plastic cap and trade system will include and will not be limited to the combined total of the Top 40 plastic polluters; oil and gas companies, the largest and best Plastics Producers and Resins Manufacturers, the major players in the Food Service Packaging Industry, and consumer brands.

EXXON, ENI, BASF, DOW CHEMICAL, INEOS, SABIC, LYONDELL BASELL, LG CHEM, CHEVRON PHILLIPS, LANXESS, ALPLA, FORMOSA PLASTICS CORPORATION and BOROUGE together generate approximately US$608 Billion in annual global sales.

As the Food Service Packaging Market will be worth 84.33 Billion USD by 2022, other entities included in global plastic pollution cap and trade system will be Amcor Limited (Australia), Bemis Company, Inc (U.S.), WestRock Company (U.S.), Sealed Air Corporation (U.S.), Reynolds Group Holding Limited (New Zealand), DS Smith Plc (U.K.), Huhtamaki Oyj (Finland), Berry Plastic Corporation (U.S.), Ball Corporation (U.S.), Genpak LLC (U.S.), Dart Product Europe Limited (U.K.), Anchor Packaging Inc. (U.S.), Sabert Corporation (U.S.), Union packaging (U.S.), Fabri-Kal (U.S.), Excellent Packaging & Supply (U.S.), ISAP Packaging SPA (Italy), Landon Bio Packaging (U.K.), Hefei Hengxin Environmental Science & Technology Co., Ltd (China), and King Yuan Fu Packaging Co., Ltd. (Taiwan).

Also included in the plastic cap and trade system “The companies that pollute seas and at the same time burden communities with waste that can neither be composted nor recycled,” Nestle, Unilever, PT Torabika Mayora, Procter & Gamble, Monde Nissin, Colgate Palmolive, Oishi, Zesto, NutriAsia, UR Universal Robina, and Tora Bika.

If China and East Asia are the worst plastic polluters, why should Canada, the US and Europe pay?

On November 1, SWEEP (Solid Waste Environmental Excellence Protocol) reported that the Ocean Conservancy raised eyebrows in their 2015 report Stemming the Tide by identifying China as the largest source of marine plastic pollution.

The report notes that China generates “relatively low waste per capita”, meaning the only way it makes sense for China to be the world’s largest contributor to marine plastic pollution is to consider that they have been importing the rest of the world’s plastic, including the low-to-no-value waste plastic in our 3-7 bales.

Europe, Canada and the United States export new plastics and plastic waste to everywhere in the world.

In 2011, the 27 EU Member States exported around 3.36 million tonnes with a total value around 961 million €uros of "waste, parings and scrap plastic" with the largest part of shipments being sent to East Asia.

In 2012, Canadians exported 14 percent -- 39,900 metric tonnes or 39.9 billion kilos of recyclables to developing nations like China, India and the Philippines causing them very expensive environmental and health problems. 

In September 2017, organizations under the Break Free from Plastic banner participated in a series of coastal cleanups and brand audits around the world to name the brands that are polluting our beaches. They identified Nestle, Unilever, and Procter & Gamble companies that are headquartered in the global north, among the biggest contributors to plastic pollution in the Philippines which happens to be in Southeast Asia.

Like it or not, it’s hard to argue that Canada, the U.S., and Europe haven’t been complicit in China’s and Southeast Asia’s biggest-in-the-world contribution to plastic in our oceans.

To Recycle or NOT to Recycle

On November 15, 2017, Steve Alexander, President of the Association of Plastic Recyclers, speaking at a conference organized by the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries in Washington for America Recycles Day, cautioned: "We can spend $150 million on some marine debris collection issue in Southeast Asia, but the fact of the matter is we need to be a little more granular and we need to start at the bottom."

The $150 million is not to fund marine debris collection operations. The $150 million investment plan is for land-based recycling and waste management programs to prevent plastic waste from leaking into the Southeast Asian Oceans and Seas; namely the North Pacific and the Indian Oceans and the East China, Philippine, Banda and the Arafura Seas.

This new funding mechanism is very compatible with Mr Alexander’s calling on large consumer product companies to increase their commitment to using recycled plastics, including making long-term contractual commitments to recycling companies that will enable those firms to invest.

Mr Alexander said, "The last thing we need is another company claiming their product is recyclable or asking us to please recycle without making any investment in it.”

Alexander also predicted that China's import ban of scrap plastics announced in July 2017, which sent global prices for waste plastic into a tailspin, will ultimately be a "necessary wake-up call" that will lead to more investment in U.S. recycling.

I trust Mr Alexander will work with the Ocean Conservancy and it's Alliance partners which include the petrochemical industry to also involve the food packaging industry and the organic plastics industry.

The UpGyres PLASTIKA REPARABILIS CHALLENGE will help with that.

Contrary to the petrochemical plastics industry new marketing and public relations ploy that plastic end-users, not the industry, are responsible for making sure plastics don’t wind up littering the environment and that the responsibility is fairly and squarely on the plastic end-users, we as a planet "need to stop paying to poison each other [and paying to poison the environment], and we all need to work together to make it happen".

It is our responsibility, as users of petro-plastics, to bring the plastic manufacturers, the food packaging and the petrochemical industries into the carbon market with a tailor-made cap and trade system for plastics that links with the larger market and complements enforcing zero tolerance for plastic pollution.

Cities and entire nations are legislating to phase out single-use, disposable, oil and gas based plastics by shifting to renewable and nature-recyclable bioplastics.

Given that there are enough fossil reserves in the ground worldwide to take us through a couple of centuries, there’s no need to convert all those fossil based reserves into plastics because consumers and countries are shifting away from oil and gas-derived plastics.

We are not going to extract all the fossil reserves from the ground, and we are also not going to be reliant on fossil feedstocks to make plastics for much longer, so we have to ensure that fossil-based plastic manufacturing such as Dow’s PacXpert are not only lower in carbon and use less energy to produce, but that they are also 100% recyclable 100% of the time.

While acknowledging that recycling is still a meaningful front-line strategy for reducing solid waste, recycling itself, however, can be an elusive factor in waste management. Studies indicate that in the United States more than 90 percent of plastic, including much that goes into blue boxes, is never recycled.

“When people think their stuff is being recycled, it clears their conscience, no matter what is actually happening beyond the blue box,” says Myra Hird, Professor in the School of Environmental Studies, Director of the General Research Group, and founder of Canada's Waste Flow research group.

“Our research shows that when their conscience is clear they tend to consume more than ever. Since Canadians started recycling in earnest maybe 30 years ago, consumerism in this country has done nothing but climb.”

“The unfortunate reality is that diverting waste into recycling costs money,” says Daniel Hoornweg, a one-time waste management advisor to the World Bank, and an associate professor of energy systems at the University of Ontario, Institute of Technology in Oshawa.

 “…Even 100 percent recycling isn't going to slow down the production of all the junk our culture makes and buys, which is, of course, the real source of waste; and it won't do anything to clean up all the overloaded dumps (and chocking oceans) of the world.”

“By the time waste gets recycled, 95 percent of the environmental damage has already occurred – in oil extraction, (water consumption), in the poisoning of our rivers and air ... the output of carbon,” he says.

It is important to understand that the limitations on what’s recyclable are due to differences in waste management facilities and municipal recycling systems are under the stress that plastic packaging changes faster than cities can communicate to residents what's OK to put in recycling bins.

"If we are serious about reducing the amount of solid waste being dumped in oceans or flowing through waterways into oceans and marine ecosystems, then we need to work at all levels, including with municipalities which deal with solid waste management at a grassroots level," said Julian Reyna, Secretary-General of the Permanent Commission on the South Pacific, Ecuador.

The Transition

During the transition away from oil and gas plastics, we need to reduce emissions across all sectors, including in plastic manufacturing, shipping and transport of plastic and plastic waste, and plastic recycling, to ensure that the existing petroleum plastic producers and recyclers are "as clean (and sustainable) as possible," we need to develop new forms of nature-degradable plastics and new business models that will rent Petroleum Plastic Packaging as a Service.

Petro plastic manufacturers, plastic moulder makers, and the petrochemical industry need to plan a real and meaningful transition that doesn't leave workers behind. To do so requires us to be realistic: The end of fossil fuels and fossil plastics is coming much faster than many anticipated.

Except for Indonesia who is investing 1 Billion US dollars A YEAR to curb ocean waste, including developing new industries that use biodegradable materials such as cassava and seaweed to introduce plastic alternatives into the market, currently most other governments and businesses are unprepared to take advantage of the clean, renewable, bio-compatible plastics that are here now and that the market is demanding—and the jobs that are needed to bring them to market.

"This change requires vision, leadership and realism. [Oil and gas plastics] are in an irreversible decline: Every day they and we delay is a wasted day that could have been spent diversifying community economies, helping workers transition" to jobs making new, sustainable, reusable, recyclable organic plastics that not only feature reduced transportation costs, use less energy and use renewable resources but also offer durability that meets and even exceeds the standards of most oil and gas rigid and film packaging formats and will not poison the environment if they fall out of the recycling system. In other words, nature-derived plastics that are superior in every way to oil and gas plastics.

The PLASTIKA REPARABILIS CHALLENGE point is to accelerate this transition to sustainable, 100% recyclable and 100% renewable plastic sources around the world; to trade technologies, systems and recyclable, unrecyclable, and bio-based plastics with each other to optimize their value and re-incorporate them into the economy.

The PLASTIKA REPARABILIS CHALLENGE takes bold action to prioritize tracking of petrochemicals and plastic products and packaging for easy recovery and recycling or upcycling.

ALL plastics in ONE bin everywhere on the PLANET.

The UpGyres CHALLENGE seeks partner citizens, businesses, industry, and mayors of the great cities banning disposable petroleum-based plastics to launch a competition for creating local systems globally for the recovery and processing of renewable, sustainable, recyclable and healthy plastic packaging, products and jobs for present and future generations to enjoy.

Solutions

For Tesla, to build its cars and semis using Canadian Kestrel’s hemp composite body shell. The body of the car is completely made out of hemp, completely impact-resistant and will help Tesla minimize even further the environmental impact that the cars of the future will still create.

For oil refineries and supermarkets, Clara Salina proposes to recycle plastic waste in every oil refinery worldwide. Sending waste plastic to refineries to process them into low sulphur / low emissions fuel and into chemicals for new plastics.

Her Barcode vs Plastic Waste seeks supermarket involvement in the collection and sorting of waste plastics.

This is a brilliant, effective and efficient idea and use of supply chains and resources already demonstrated by purpose-built recycling centres at both Shepperton Film Studios and Pinewood Film Studios in the UK that ensure reduced transportation of recovered materials, a maximum amount of material sent for recycling, and zero waste sent to landfill.

Oil refineries and plastic producers around the world can hire a service from Quebec based Pyrowave plastic depolymerization machines using microwaves. Pyrowave takes post-consumer mixed plastic materials and decomposes them into their building blocks to make virgin-like plastics.

Having oil refineries in countries with no plastic recycling capabilities or infrastructure accept waste plastic and using Pyrowave to help them reclaim chemicals that they can then sell will be to their economic benefit and help them become part of the solution.

For the Canadian “Naturally Green” company from the beginning of this post, a service gaining attention in the Canadian market called Polystyvert solves the problems of transporting and recycling polystyrene by putting a machine that recycles the plastic on premises. The machine dissolves the material using essential oils and separates out the polystyrene so it can be used again for packaging.

For buildings and streetscapes in villages, towns and cities with heavy pedestrian traffic, smart waste receptacles, TrashBots that automatically sort recyclables from landfill waste.

CONCLUSION

One way or another, through bans, taxes, losing market share, brand audits, falling sales, loss of subsidies, carbon pricing, a global plastic cap and trade system or a combination of two or more of these realities, the petrochemical and plastics industries and brands that use them will be paying for the Planetary Plastic Pollution Crisis that they knowingly created.

It is up to them to make the right investments and convert their pollution remediation costs and the costs of recovering the resources embedded in their products into revenue streams.

The CDP, Catalyst for Change report's authors point out that “If (petroleum based) plastics are to have a future, we will need to be able to recycle them back into valuable products time and again, and we will need to find new ways to make them.”

Daniel Hoornweg, Associate Professor, is adamant that the ultimate cure for waste lies in reducing “front end” consumerism.

Kyle Winkler, Supervisor in the Pittsburgh Department of Public Works’ Recycling says, “Waste items will always need to be managed, but hopefully in increasingly thoughtful ways than what we are doing now. We’ve sent folks to the moon, landed reusable booster rockets on remotely operated landing pads in the ocean, will soon have self-driving [and flyig] cars, but still, we are designing items for trash and sending them to a hole in the ground [or pushed into the sea]. Seems like a system and practice that is long overdue for a change.”

PLASTIKA REPARABILIS CHALLENGE. Local Solutions Globally.

?ALL plastics in ONE bin everywhere on the PLANET.

For information about the PLASTIKA REPARABILIS CHALLENGE and sponsorship opportunities, please contact: joseluis (@) upgyres (dot) org