The Plughole Problem (part 1)

As you may have noticed there’s been a good deal of hullabaloo about plastics in the environment recently, with various meetings and conferences aiming to produce ‘a binding international plastics treaty’. All very laudable and at the least attracting attention to the worldwide problem of plastic waste that affects virtually all living things, killing and debilitating many of them. Reading some of the resulting news and comment what strikes me is that the whole subject is hexed by the contemporary obsession of inventing revolutionary new schemes while ignoring the damage being done by the old ones. Concentrating on symptoms while never confronting the causes. It’s a malaise that seems to affect all climate and biodiversity issues. Building solar farms while continuing to run coal-fired power stations, planting millions of new trees while continuing to destroy natural forests, especially old-growth. I call this the Plughole Problem; finding beautiful new taps to turn on, while failing to block the plughole. It’s a problem that is exacerbated by the media; new ideas look good on TV – a critique of bad old ideas turns viewers off, doesn’t sell newspapers. For politicians with only a superficial knowledge of the issues, it comes naturally.

The plughole problem: turning on new taps without dealing with the plughole. Copyright Edward Milner/ACACIA Productions

The plastic waste problem is rising inexorably and scheduled to get worse; various authorities expect the mountain of waste to double by 2040 or sooner. At this rate soon you won’t be able to walk out of the door before encountering heaps of discarded Amazon packaging. It’s treated as if the whole process was inevitable. Unlike volcanic eruptions, the proximate cause of the problem is not too much plastic waste but too much plastic, especially single-use plastic that is unrecyclable. Big corporations find their current processes so profitable that they will do anything to make sure they don’t have to change, instead encouraging this focus on symptoms, not the cause. And the cause, much of the time, as David Whyte (“Ecocide”, 2020, Manchester University Press) so convincingly argues, is the overbearing and unrelenting influence of big corporations.

Plastic bottles (Exxon Mobil expects to expand plastic production by 30% in the next five years). Image by Dean Moriarty from Pixabay

The whole plastics industry is currently based on a business model unhindered by a ‘polluter pays’ principle. According to a very recent London School of Economics (LSE) report just 20 petrochemical companies are responsible for more than half the world’s single-use plastic. The reason single-use plastic packaging is so widely used is because it is cheap – and very useful – and extremely profitable to manufacture because the true cost is never paid. The corporations involved resist any attempt to rein them in, while shedding crocodile tears over the problems caused. ExxonMobil  claims to ‘share society’s concerns’ about plastic waste – but still plans to increase production by 30% in the next five years, according to this new LSE reports.   As Prof Sam Frankhauser, one of the LSE authors says: ‘our reliance on oil and gas is not only fuelling climate change, but as primary material used in the production of throwaway plastics (it) is also devastating our oceans’. The costs of our use of plastic have effectively been externalised by the petrochemical industry by shifting responsibility for clearing up the resultant pollution onto virtually everyone else: governments, local communities and all of us concerned individuals. Bright ideas abound for recycling small amounts of this waste, or clearing it from limited environments. But it’s a drop in the ocean. Without some more fundamental change the plastic waste issue will continue to be dogged by the Plughole Problem.

Planetary Health Weekly: Biodiversity Blog 16 – by Edward Milner (views my own)

N.B. First published in Planetary Health Weekly, a free weekly blog about the health of the planet.