Environmental movements spend millions of dollars on campaigns to convince you and me that we are the problem. But ‘we’ aren’t. At least, we’re not much of the problem. Before we contemplate solutions, we need to understand the problem.
Typical environmental campaigns about plastic pollution, like this one, follow a familiar pattern. First, they exaggerate, using vague language, insinuation and exclamation marks.
‘…between 4 and 12 million metric tons of plastic enter the ocean each year – enough to cover every foot of coastline on the planet!’
Well, with many years’ worth of plastic piling up, why isn’t every foot of coastline on the planet, or at least most of it, totally covered in plastic, by now?
‘In the ocean, plastic pollution impacts sea turtles, whales, seabirds, fish, coral reefs, and countless other marine species and habitats. In fact, scientists estimate that more than half of the world’s sea turtles and nearly every seabird on Earth have eaten plastic in their lifetimes.’
Sure, but what does ‘impacts’ really mean? All the articles and research papers to which the campaign refers rely on anecdotal evidence or speculation. They ponder all the ways in which plastic could harm animals, or in some cases does harm animals. They document cases of plastic being ingested, but not the harm that this does.
‘[E]vidence of population level impacts from plastic pollution is still emerging,’ says one of the studies cited.
‘Additional studies are needed to determine the [effects] of ingested plastics … on fish health and the food chain implications,’ says another.
‘Despite the proliferation of microplastics, their impact on marine ecosystems is poorly understood,’ says a third.
None of the cited works – not one – is able to assess the scale of actual harm that plastic pollution does to birds and marine animals. Even when they conclude that half the world’s turtles, or nearly every sea bird, has ingested plastic, for example, they do not specify exactly how much these animals ingest, and cannot specify how exactly this harms them other than pointing to anecdotal cases of choking, gastric obstruction or gastric perforation.
Lies and contradictions
Another cited article says: ‘A study last year concluded there were more than five trillion pieces of plastic, weighing 269,000 tonnes [i.e. metric tons], in the world’s oceans. That is more than the weight of every human on the planet.’
It bases the first sentence on this study from 2014, which sampled plastic particles in 24 expeditions to all five of the world’s sub-tropical ocean gyres.
This spectacularly contradicts the ‘between 4 and 12 million tons per year’ claim of earlier, which was based on estimates from this paper. But who cares about consistency, when you’re using the cult of scary-big numbers to evoke an emotional response?
The second sentence is based on thin air. If the average weight of a human being is about 80kg (which it is, roughly), and there are 7.9 billion people on the planet (which there are, roughly), then the total weight of all humans on the planet works out to 632 million metric tons. So the total amount of plastic in the world’s oceans is less than one two-thousandth of the weight of every human on the planet.
Humans make up only about one thousandth of all the biomass on the planet, so the total amount of plastic pollution in the ocean makes up less than one two-millionth of all the world’s biomass. That hardly sounds like a crisis.
The vast majority of plastic in the oceans consists of very small pieces. Given that five trillion grains of sand fit into a box 4.2m to a side, we can safely assume that five trillion pieces of plastic might fill up a few beaches, but not all 356 000km of the world’s coastline.
So, we have very vague, but certainly exaggerated, descriptions of the actual problem. The point, after all, is to get people emotionally involved, not to appeal to their rational minds.
It is clear to anyone with eyes to see that plastic pollution is a problem, although scientists aren’t sure how big of a problem it really is. Let’s assume, therefore, despite the hysterical exaggeration and outright contradictions of environmental campaigners, that the goal to reduce plastic pollution, both on land and in the marine environment, is a laudable and worthwhile one.
Whose responsibility?
Second, the campaign targets wealthy elites; in this case, they target the US population specifically. This is misleading, because despite being a large, rich economy, the US – and indeed all wealthy countries – contribute a relatively small amount to the world’s plastic pollution problem.
Ninety percent of the land-based plastic waste that does reach the sea gets there via 10 major rivers: the Yangtze, the Indus, the Yellow River, the Hai He river, the Ganges, the Pearl River, the Amur River, the Mekong, the Nile and the Niger.
You’ll notice that eight of those are in Asia, and two in Africa. None flow from rich countries, where environmentalists are getting single-use plastics banned.
Admittedly, some of that plastic gets there by being exported by rich countries, and then mismanaged in the scavenger countries. However, this isn’t going to get solved by reducing production in rich countries, or by prohibiting plastic straws.
In poor countries, the economic incentive to continue to use plastic instead of more expensive alternatives, such as paper, canvas, wood or metal, is irresistible. Even on the infrequent occasion when acceptable alternatives to plastic exist, poor countries simply cannot afford the luxury of these more expensive alternatives.
So the vast majority of the problem will persist, no matter what the rich people in Europe, the US, or South Africa, do about their personal plastic consumption.
Reducing plastic production in the rich world, or performative penance gestures like giving up plastic straws in the West, means next to nothing.
This brings us to the third aspect of the campaign: ‘Plastic Pollution Solutions: 7 Things You Can Do Today.’
Do this, do that
You see, they want wealthy elites to take personal responsibility for the plastic pollution caused by their capitalist, consumerist, convenience-driven lifestyles.
So, their list starts with ‘Reduce Your Use of Single-Use Plastics’. As we saw in my ode to plastic, there are a lot of excellent reasons to use single-use plastics, such as hygiene and food safety, and many of the alternatives are more expensive for the economy, and worse for the environment, than the plastic items they replace.
They want you to ‘Support Legislation to Curb Plastic Production and Waste’, including the newly proposed global plastic pollution treaty. That would be a terrible idea. Such legislation always makes things more expensive, which harms the poor, and always has unintended consequences, such as decreasing hygiene and convenience, and increasing the pressure on forestry or mining resources.
Deadweight costs to an economy imposed by legislation, even if it ‘creates jobs’, means that resources are not optimally allocated to increase the general standard of living, which is what is most needed, especially in the developing world.
Legislation also almost always misdiagnoses the problem, and therefore imposes flawed ‘solutions’, such as the corrupt, abortive Recycling and Economic Development Initiative of SA.
They want you to ‘Recycle Properly’, but recycling is not worth the effort unless companies pay you (or your bin pickers) for your recycling. Those who advocate recycling never take into account the environmental costs of the soap and hot water you need to rinse recyclables; the valuable time this costs that you could have spent earning money, or playing with your children; the additional floor space required by multiple dedicated recycling bins, which many poorer people are not likely to have spare; and the extra fuel used, and pollution caused, to drive waste to a recycling centre or to duplicate the municipal waste disposal infrastructure.
And, once again, if you’re among the wealthy elite that take recycling seriously, your plastic isn’t the problem, by a long way. Between 60% and 86% of oceanic plastic garbage is in fact abandoned fishing gear, and not consumer litter. That fishing gear is actively designed to capture or kill marine life, and it doesn’t stop doing so just because it has been lost or abandoned.
Only between 2% to 3% of our plastic waste reaches the ocean as litter, and that is as likely to be mismanaged recycling, or the many types of plastic that simply are not recyclable and are disposed of anyway, as it is plastic that gets discarded with the rest of the unsorted waste.
And we’ve seen that the vast majority of plastic waste that does reach the ocean does so via river systems in the developing countries of Asia and Africa.
Get involved, give money
They exhort you to ‘Participate In (or Organize) a Beach or River Cleanup’. This is, in fact, an excellent idea, and I can highly recommend doing so.
They want you to ‘Avoid Products Containing Microbeads’. I am far from convinced that plastic microbeads, as used in personal hygiene and cosmetic products, are particularly harmful. Just as with microplastics in general, there isn’t a whole lot of evidence that they cause actual harm in the environment. Silica (sand) is another excellent exfoliant, it is everywhere, and it doesn’t (often) kill anything.
Avoiding microbeads isn’t an unreasonable suggestion, but frankly, the free market system is already disposing of them. I’m no afficionado of the bathroom or cosmetics aisles, but I can’t remember when last I saw a product with microbeads. No consumers seem to want them, so no companies want to produce them.
Either way, this is one of those ‘solutions’ that will make a vanishingly small difference in reality. Most oceanic microplastic is degraded macroplastic, or clothing fibres, not microbeads.
Then, they want you to ‘Spread the Word’. Seriously. Please don’t. Imagine me reciting this entire column at you in the pub. That would be what you’d sound like regurgitating the anti-plastics campaign talking points. Except that you’d be wrong.
Finally, item seven on their list of things you can do today is ‘Support Organizations Addressing Plastic Pollution’. Like them, of course.
All this campaigning for good causes always ends with a begging bowl. ‘If you donate generously, we’ll wash away all your sins!’
In a future article, we’ll rely on this outline of the plastic pollution problem to condemn proposed solutions that won’t make a jot of difference, and propose some solutions that might.
And if you really have money burning a hole in your pocket, donate it to an organisation that works to promote classical liberalism. Unlike with the myriad plastic-pollution campaigns, at least one can have a reasonable expectation that it would be honest and moderately effective.
[Image: https://pixabay.com/photos/plastic-waste-washed-up-2304042/]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
If you like what you have just read, support the Daily Friend