Americans May Add Five Times More Plastic to
the Oceans Than Thought
The United States is using more
plastic than ever, and waste exported for
recycling is often mishandled, according
to a new study.
The United States contribution
to coastal plastic pollution worldwide is
significantly larger than previously
thought, possibly by as much as five
times, according to a study published
Friday. The research, published in Science
Advances, is the sequel to a 2015 paper
by the same authors. Two factors
contributed to the sharp increase:
Americans are using more plastic than
ever and the current study included
pollution generated by United States
exports of plastic waste, while the earlier
one did not.
The United States, which does
not have sufficient infrastructure to
handle its recycling demands at home,
exports about half of its recyclable waste.
Of the total exported, about 88 percent
ends up in countries considered to have
inadequate waste management.
“When you consider how much
of our plastic waste isn’t actually
recyclable because it is low-value,
contaminated or difficult to process, it’s
not surprising that a lot of it ends up
polluting the environment,” said the
study’s lead author, Kara Lavender Law,
research professor of oceanography at
Sea Education Association, in a
statement.
The study estimates that in
2016, the United States contributed
between 1.1 and 2.2 million metric tons of
plastic waste to the oceans through a
combination of littering, dumping and
mismanaged exports. At a minimum,
that’s almost double the total estimated
waste in the team’s previous study. At the
high end, it would be a fivefold increase
over the earlier estimate.
Nicholas Mallos, a senior
director at the Ocean Conservancy and an
author of the study, said the upper
estimate would be equal to a pile of
plastic covering the area of the White
House Lawn and reaching as high as the
Empire State Building.
The ranges are wide partly
because “there’s no real standard for
being able to provide good quality data on
collection and disposal of waste in
general,” said Ted Siegler, a resource
economist at DSM Environmental
Solutions, a consulting firm, and an
author of the study. Mr. Siegler said the
researchers had evaluated waste-disposal
practices in countries around the world
and used their “best professional
judgment” to determine the lowest and
highest amounts of plastic waste likely to
escape into the environment. They settled
on a range of 25 percent to 75 percent.
Tony Walker, an associate
professor at the Dalhousie University
School for Resource and Environmental
Studies in Halifax, Nova Scotia, said that
analyzing waste data can amount to a
“data minefield” because there are no
data standards across municipalities.
Moreover, once plastic waste is shipped
overseas, he said, data is often not
recorded at all.
Nonetheless, Dr. Walker, who
was not involved in the study, said it
could offer a more accurate accounting of
plastic pollution than the previous study,
which likely underestimated the United
States’ contribution. “They’ve put their
best estimate, as accurate as they can be
with this data,” he said, and used ranges,
which underscores that the figures are
estimates.
Of the plastics that go into the
United States recycling system, about 9
percent of the country’s total plastic
waste, there is no guarantee that they’ll
be remade into new consumer goods. New
plastic is so inexpensive to manufacture
that only certain expensive, high-grade
plastics are profitable to recycle within the
United States, which is why roughly half
of the country’s plastic waste was shipped
abroad in 2016, the most recent year for
which data is available.
Since 2016, however, the
recycling landscape has changed. China
and many countries in Southeast Asia
have stopped accepting plastic waste
imports. And lower oil prices have further
reduced the market for recycled plastic.
“What the new study really underscores is
we have to get a handle on source
reduction at home,” Mr. Mallos said. “That
starts with eliminating unnecessary and
problematic single-use plastics.”
From: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/30/
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