These days, it seems like everything I read causes me to become more and more
pessimistic about the future and angrier about human greed.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Roger Loran Bailey
(Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Thursday, January 21, 2021 11:09 AM
To: blind-democracy <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] The Truth About Recycling
The Truth About Recycling
https://socialistaction.org/2021/01/15/the-truth-about-recycling/
January 15, 2021
By Paul Goettlich
We’re told that a world without plastics is impossible to imagine. But
70 years ago, I lived with almost none of it. Modern humans lived without it
for almost 200-thousand years. Now it’s plainly an existential threat to all
life on Earth. And it’s literally everywhere.
It’s impossible to overstate how much plastic surrounds us.
Plastics production began, in earnest, about 1950 and grew quite steadily over
the last 70 years to the point that more than 9.1 billion tons of plastic have
been made. That’s more than enough to cover Manhattan’s 22.7 square mile area
under two miles of plastic waste – a staggering 45 cubic miles of plastic.
Until recently, plastics manufacturers haven’t considered where it would all go
after its use.
Much of it is used less than one minute before carelessly discarded.
Plastics aren’t durable, but they simultaneously fail to decompose safely in a
timely manner. They all migrate harmful toxins into whatever they contact.
We’re led to think the ‘chasing arrows’ symbol on plastic indicates it’s
recyclable and that the number inside the triangles indicates the type of
plastic. Both are exaggerations, essentially deceptions. The chemical makeup of
all plastic types varies between manufacturers. There is no standard, making
the recycling numbers nonspecific for the purposes of recycling. Dave
Williamson, an ancient plastic recycler in Berkeley, considers that
inconsistency in plastic formulas one type of contamination that hinders
recycling because they cannot be mixed without decreasing its value. Another
type of contamination comes from the substances that the plastic containers
held. In other words, your food gets into the plastic. Conversely, that plastic
also gets into your food.
The FDA, which regulates food contact plastics, states that all plastics must
meet their standards for migration of toxic chemicals. But FDA regulations are
not consistent with current scientific knowledge. They fail to acknowledge
that extremely low doses of plastic’s constituent chemicals disturb and injure
the endocrine systems of humans and all animals. And the industry is trusted to
test its own products, leaving us with little defense and protecting the
industry instead. The chemical ingredients of plastics are proprietary
information protected by law – trade secrets. The FDA is prohibited from
releasing them to the public which makes public research of the toxicity
extremely difficult.
Officially, 9% has been recycled, but less than 1% has been recycled more than
once. That means it isn’t actually recycled or recyclable. The system of
recycling was never meaningfully thought out. Instead it’s merely a tool of
waste management that was fraudulently concocted by the industry to impose its
responsibilities onto the public. Their burden of waste is placed on the public
in terms of tax dollars, land use, environmental damage and depletion, as well
as simple aesthetics and healthcare costs. These are enormous burdens on all
parts of society.
Even academic integrity is severely affected by corporate control through its
funding.
Incineration is presently at 12% and rising. The majority, 60% of all plastics
ever produced were landfilled or discarded in the natural environment. Plastics
recycling is a lie. Biodegradable plastics is an oxymoron because the legal
definitions barely consider the massive volumes produced and their toxicity.
Quite simply, they don’t biodegrade. Green plastics and the circular economy of
plastics are yet more distractions to allow plastics to continue being
produced.
Bioplastics can be just as toxic as petroleum-based plastics. They have the
added burden of being composed of GMO crops such as corn and soy which are
products of a vile commercial ag industry that thrives on highly toxic
synthetic chemical inputs such as Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide. Bioplastics
also fail to fully biodegrade. The key tools of these massive corporations are
lies, spin, lobbyists, payoffs, threats, and more lies.
In the early 1960s, plastic trash floated by me as I sailed the Long Island
Sound. In 1974, Dr Edward J. Carpenter wrote about his observations of pelagic
plastic in the journal Science. He recently told me that a plastics industry
representative visited him at his workplace, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute
and threatened him and possibly his superiors to discontinue writing about it.
In 2001, we learned that there was 6-times more plastic floating plankton in
the North Pacific Gyre by weight. The response from regulators was a daft
silence.
Twenty years later and conditions are critically worse, both in terms of
quantities and how much is known about the harm of these environmental
toxicants to all life. Not only has there been no effective action taken in
reducing plastics waste and production, there’s considerably more going into
the oceans, up into the air and down into the earth. My own opinion is that the
production of most or all plastics and synthetic polymers must be halted
immediately. If it is made, there is no way to control where it ends up. And
the chances of chemically redesigning these plastics to be nontoxic is close to
zero. Reducing toxicity could be compared to a Biden presidency to replace
Trump’s.
By 2016, the US was desperately keeping up with plastic waste by shipping
almost 700,000 tons a year to China alone. Then in January 2018, China
essentially banned all plastic waste from the US and the rest of the world. In
spite of this, municipalities still carry on the hoax of recyclable plastics by
collecting them at the curbside. The official reasoning is that if people are
told to stop recycling, they won’t restart. But most of it goes to landfills
and incinerators. Actual recycling of plastics is corporate puffery that won’t
even come close to realty for decades, if at all. And even then, in order for
it to be convincing, many of the environmental and social side effects will be
need to be kept secret from the public.
In Indonesia, tofu makers in the East Java village Tropodo, fuel their boilers
with plastic waste. Until recently, the US was a major supplier of that plastic
waste. The global environmental network IPEN <ipen.org> studied levels of
dioxin in free range chicken eggs in Tropodo and found similar levels to those
at a former US Army airbase in Vietnam, where the soil was contaminated by
Agent Orange. Dioxin is known as one of the most toxic chemicals and is mostly
anthropogenic, or human created.
The production of PVC (polyvinyl chloride) plastic inevitably creates dioxin as
a byproduct. The industry claims it as unintentional. But it is most
intentional because they’ve known about the problem for decades yet continue to
produce it. The incineration of chlorine-containing materials like PVC also
creates more dioxin.
Plastics are produced from refined oil and natural gas products, making strong
corporate ties between plastics and petroleum. One of the economic effects of
COVID-19 was that we used far less oil products. We drove and flew far less,
making the value of Exxon Mobile got so low that it was removed from the Dow
Jones Industrial Average. The price of plastics has also reached record lows.
Taxpayers fund direct subsidies to the fossil fuel industry is about $20
billion per year. That means we fund climate change. The US is now producing
more energy than is consumed. Therefore, the industry is searching for a place
to put its excess oil and gas, which it firmly insists on continuing. Plastics
is that place.
Industry has its hopes on Kenya as a hub to spread US plastics throughout
Africa. The key to the project are US-Kenyan trade negotiations which its
president is in favor of. The snag for him is that on 28 August 2017, Kenya
banned plastic bags and stopped importing plastic waste. Undoubtedly, lobbyists
will find profitable employment seeking to circumvent this restriction and all
other like it.
The truth is that all or most plastic production must be halted because if it
is made, there is no containing it. The same with the fossil-fuel driven energy
system and the associated global warming that portends ongoing and deepening
climate catastrophe. The profit system invariably operates to subordinate the
health and well-being of the earth’s people to the private interests of the
corporate elite.
Check out Paul Goettlich at https://anthropogenic.world
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--
George H. Smith “It is my firm conviction that man has nothing to gain,
emotionally or otherwise, by adhering to a falsehood, regardless of how
comfortable or sacred that falsehood may appear. Anyone who claims, on
the one hand, that he is concerned with human welfare, and who demands,
on the other hand, that man must suspend or renounce the use of his
reason, is contradicting himself. There can be no knowledge of what is
good for man apart from knowledge of reality and human nature, and there
is no manner in which this knowledge can be acquired except through
reason. To advocate irrationality is to advocate that which is
destructive to human life.” ― George H. Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God
