Are Our Plastics Addictions Worse for the Environment Than Flying? The Answer Is Yes.

by Robert McGarvey

Rip up that script from “The Graduate.” You’ll remember the scene where a middle aged man takes Dustin Hoffman (the graduate) aside and offers him one word of career advice: Plastics. That was 1967 and, indeed, plastics has had a great run – but now it is demonized as worse than air travel.

Read that last sentence again because many of us have begrudgingly embraced the belief that air travel is poison to our planet but now a new report has come out from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that says – to quote the headline in The Hill – “Plastics industry heats world 4 times as much as air travel, report finds.”

The Guardian added: “‘the plastic industry is ‘undermining the world’s efforts to address climate change’, said Heather McTeer Toney, executive director of the Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Beyond Petrochemicals campaign, which helped fund the new report.”

The aviation industry contributes just 2.5% of the planet’s carbon emissions.  The rub is that only a tiny percentage of the globe’s population flies and so the whole planet suffers because of the few who fly.  Even so, flying does not contribute that much to global warming.

Not when compared to plastics.  Reported The Hill: “if plastic production remains constant, by 2050 it could burn through nearly a fifth of the Earth’s remaining carbon budget — the amount of carbon dioxide climate scientists believe can be burned without tipping the climate into unsafe territory.”

The Hill added: “emissions [from plastics plants] are equivalent to those of about 600 coal plants — about three times the number that exist across the U.S.”

Plastics have another toxic payload besides air pollution: “Plastic accumulating in our oceans and on our beaches has become a global crisis. Billions of pounds of plastic can be found in swirling convergences that make up about 40 percent of the world’s ocean surfaces. At current rates plastic is expected to outweigh all the fish in the sea by 2050,” according to the Center for Biological Diversity. 

So plastics are fouling our air and our water.

There’s now  a dust up between environmental groups – that want to see much less plastic on our planet – and the plastics companies who insist that recycling can fix many ills.  

But there’s also evidence that plastics recycling can create additional planetary toxicity.  Reported the Washington Post: “A recent peer-reviewed study that focused on a recycling facility in the United Kingdom suggests that anywhere between 6 to 13 percent of the plastic processed could end up being released into water or the air as microplastics — ubiquitous tiny particles smaller than five millimeters that have been found everywhere from Antarctic snow to inside human bodies.”

Plastics recycling is also something of a con:  Reported NPR: “The vast majority of plastic that people use, and in many cases put into blue recycling bins, is headed to landfills, or worse, according to a report from Greenpeace on the state of plastic recycling in the U.S. The report cites separate data …which revealed that the amount of plastic actually turned into new things has fallen to new lows of around 5%. That number is expected to drop further as more plastic is produced.”

Where does all this fit into a traveler’s life? Many of us have guilt about flying. Of course we can seek to fly less and every flight not taken – with a Zoom call substituting – indeed cuts carbon in the air. I still recommend that and seek to practice it myself.

But chew on this:  it may be as – or more – impactful if we also seek to dramatically cut our personal plastics consumption.  And we use lots of the stuff. According to the University of Michigan’s Center for Sustainable Systems, “At 139 kg per capita per year (not including fiber and rubber polymers) North America has the highest per capita plastic consumption in the world.”

Remember this too: plastics are made from fossil fuels.  

The Hill closed out its piece with this: ““While global leaders are trying to negotiate a solution to the plastic crisis, the petrochemical industry is investing billions of dollars in making the problem rapidly worse,” said Neil Tangri of the University of California, Berkeley….“We need a global agreement to stop this cancerous growth, bring down plastic production, and usher in a world with less plastic and less pollution.”

So next time somebody grumbles at you about flying tell you have one word for them: Plastics.