Recycling of plastics now problematic

From an Article by Renzo Pipoli, Reuters Events, October 27, 2020

The Canadian federal government announced in October plans to ban six very commonly used single-use plastic items by the end of 2021 to tackle a pollution problem that became more pressing after China banned plastic waste imports in 2018.

Canada’s Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said the ban is part of a broader plan to reach zero plastic waste within a decade that will also include making plastic producers responsible for waste. Only plastics considered both harmful to the environment and costly to recycle were listed.

The coming ban on bags and six-pack rings will affect polyethylene while the one on straws will impact polypropylene (PP). Bans on plastic cutlery and drink stirrers will affect both PP and polystyrene. Bans on plastic food containers will hit expanded polystyrene.

The Canadian government has asked for feedback by December 9th. The ban will not come into effect until the end of 2021.

The planned bans in Canada are part of an international growing tendency, said Ashish Chitalia, Wood Mackenzie’s research director. “That is a trend that we’re seeing since 2018 as it all started when China banned the imports of plastic waste, and that has encouraged exporters of plastic waste, like North America, Europe, to improve their policies and reduce plastic waste at the source,” Chitalia said.

Industry to be responsible for plastic waste collection

The China ban, “along with social pressure to tackle the plastic waste in the environment and landfills,” are encouraging regulators to consider stemming the plastic waste at the source,” Chitalia added.

Wilkinson said single-use plastics easier to collect and recycle were not included.“The focus is on plastics that are particularly problematic, and that is particularly things like expandable polystyrene or Styrofoam,” he said. For example, drink containers and lids were not included, Wilkinson added on an Oct. 7 interview with CTV News.

“The broader part of this plan is to make producers and vendors responsible for the collection and recycling, to set requirements in terms of the amount of product that has to be recycled, to require recycled content standards,” he said.

There is an urgent need in Canada to tackle the plastic waste problem, he explained. “Last year 29,000 tonnes of plastic ended up in our environment. Most of it in our lakes, our rivers, and our ocean,” he said.

Other plans include incentives to consider recyclability in product design, and mandating minimum recycled components in manufacturing.

“When we throw away plastics that don’t get recycled we waste C$8 billion worth of material every year so there’s an opportunity to make sure we’re making good value and good use of resources,” Wilkinson said.

Canadian plastic waste exports under study

According to a 2019 report by Greenpeace about Canadian waste exports following China’s import ban in the preceding year, Canadian plastic waste exporters have struggled to find destinations.

In 2015 Canada exported to China, including Hong Kong, 100,618 tonnes of plastic waste, according to Greenpeace. Then came China’s January 2018 ban on 24 materials, including eight plastics. Since the ban, waste exporters have diverted shipping to countries including Malaysia, Taiwan and several others, but divided in smaller volumes, according to Greenpeace.

Results of a Greenpeace investigation of waste plastic found in unlicensed facilities in Malaysia detected Canadian labels in the plastic waste found there, the report said. Greenpeace called on the Canadian government to meet obligations under the Basel convention on the control of trans-boundary movements of hazardous wastes and their disposal.

U.S. companies warn against plastics ban

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce sent on Sept. 21 a letter to Mary Ng, Canada’s minister of international trade, undersigned by over 50 associations representing plastics from adhesives to vinyl, to warn that the ban undermines free-trade agreements.

“The proposed ban on any product containing plastic and manufactured in the U.S. clearly meets the definition of a non-tariff barrier,” the letter said. A ban “would have a disproportionate trade impact, given the $12.1 billion of manufactured plastic that enters Canada from the United States every year,” it added.

“That is exclusive of other products (like cars, medical supplies and devices, and information technology products) that contain plastic components or goods that require plastic to prevent contamination, such as food,” it added. “Such a precedent would create further incentives to ban trade by other governments, which could impact over $10 billion in Canadian exports of plastics and plastic products,” it added.

Industry concerned about ‘toxic’ designation

Both the U.S. and Canadian plastic industries object to the use of the word ‘toxic’ to describe plastics. “Consumers would assume that every day and essential products that contain plastic are now toxic,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce letter said.

The Chemistry Industry Association of Canada (CIAC) on Oct. 7 shared the U.S. concern about the designation of plastics as ‘toxic’ and about using the Canadian Environmental Protection Act (CEPA) to regulate plastic disposal.

Wilkinson has said that if the issue around the word ‘toxic’ is one of nomenclature, the government is open to discussions but will not renounce efforts to protect the environment.

The CIAC has also shown concern about increased carbon taxation.

Canadian industry warns against ‘premature’ decisions

The Canadian government should not take “premature” decisions, the CIAC added.

Canada’s plastics producers are improving design for recycle and reuse models; and investing in recycling, it said. The industry’s own goals aim for products becoming fully recyclable or recoverable by 2030, while all plastic should be reused, recycled or recovered by 2040.

Programs to eliminate plastic pellets release from industry operations into rivers and oceans will be in place by 2022.

Canada’s plastics manufacturers add C$28 billion to the economy annually and employ 93,000 Canadians, it said. According to Wood Mackenzie’s Chitalia, the ban “gives an opportunity for Canadian producers of bioplastics to penetrate single-use plastics markets.”

###########################

See also: Plastic Pollution Coalition calls out retailers ….

Calling on AMAZON: “Ditch Single-Use Plastic Packaging”

It’s time to stop plastics pollution everywhere

Too Much Plastic Debris is Accumulating

Microbeads, Marine Debris, Regulation and the Precautionary Principle

Essay by Steven Cohen, Executive Director, Columbia University Earth Institute, December 28, 2015

A small, one could say, micro-sized miracle took place earlier this month as the United States Congress enacted the Microbead Free Waters Act of 2015. This legislation requires that manufacturers remove the beads, largely used in cosmetics, from their products by July 2017. These beads are too small to be stopped by sewage treatment plants and, once in the waters, attract toxic chemicals and find their way into fish that eat them as if they were food. We in turn eat the fish and unknowingly ingest the toxics. The miracle is that the U.S. Congress passed a piece of environmental law. According to John Schwartz of the New York Times:

“A bill to protect the environment was introduced in the House in March. In early December, the House passed the bill. A week later, the Senate passed it as well, without changing a word and by unanimous consent, just before Congress left town on Friday. That is the strangely charmed life of the Microbead-Free Waters Act of 2015, which sailed through Congress in an age when most legislation plods.”

As Mr. Schwartz’ piece indicates, there were many good reasons that the law was passed. First, many large manufacturers were already dropping their use of the microbeads, having learned of its environmental impact. Second, a number of states had already enacted statewide bans and others were considering them. But the state laws were inconsistent and would make doing business difficult for cosmetic firms. National legislation was better for business. Business lobby groups and the cosmetics industry supported the national ban and so there was really no significant opposition to it from anywhere.

Marine Debris is a Much Bigger Problem

Microbeads are a small part of the much larger problem of marine debris. As more people consume more products that are made of substances that do not biodegrade easily, if at all, the volume of plastics that end up in our waterways continues to grow. The cost of cleaning up the oceans is impossible to quantify, and communities near the water are spending more and more money trying to clean their beaches and prevent trash from entering the water in the first place. Last spring I advised a group of Columbia students in our MPA in Environmental Science and Policy program who worked for our local environmental agencies to quantify the costs of preventing trash from entering the waterways in New York and New Jersey. The group surveyed municipalities along the Hudson-Raritan Estuary and learned that “these municipalities spend $59,063,285 dollars a year on marine debris waste management activities. This translates to a per capita cost of $6.16, and $75,407 per square mile.”

The problem of marine debris is large and grows every day. Writing in National Geographic Laura Parker observes:

“The numbers are staggering: There are 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic debris in the ocean. Of that mass, 269,000 tons float on the surface, while some four billion plastic microfibers per square kilometer litter the deep sea. Scientists call these statistics the “wow factor” of ocean trash. The tallies, published last year in three separate scientific papers, are useful in red-flagging the scope of the problem for the public. But beyond the shock value, just how does adding up those rice-size fragments of plastic help solve the problem? Although scientists have known for decades about the accumulating mass of ocean debris and its deadly consequences for seabirds, fish, and marine animals, the science of sea trash is young and full of as-yet unsolved mysteries. Indeed, until scientists learn more about where ocean trash is, how densely plastic accumulates in different ocean ecosystems, and how it degrades, they can’t really calculate the damage it’s causing. There are still big, basic questions: As it degrades, do plastic toxins seep into the marine environment? If so, how and in what amounts?”

We know that there is a lot of junk in the ocean, but our knowledge of its environmental impact remains superficial and requires additional observation, data collection and analysis. We also need a new approach to introducing new technologies into economic production. Except for new drug and medical technologies which must be tested before they are allowed to be sold, other new technologies are introduced first and only regulated after damage is proven. The introduction of drugs conforms to the precautionary principle, while the introduction of other technologies conform to what we could call the reactionary principle: react after the fact and only if the damage is beyond question.

We are all like the canary that used to be lowered into the mine to see if the air was poisoned. If the canary came back dead, the miners were not allowed into the mine. If it came back alive the miners could go to work. In a more crowded world with more and more technology being developed that can damage living fauna, flora and beings, we need to understand the full impact of the new technologies we are developing. This requires a deeper understanding of earth systems science and a deeper understanding of the main and side effects of all new technologies.

The critique of prior testing of new technology is that it would inhibit innovation and the development of new technologies. It might do that, and inhibiting damaging technologies would be a good thing. There are already a number of constraints on innovation such as unimaginative management, inadequate finance, and inadequate institutional capacity. Adding a regulatory hurdle would slow things down a bit, but it would also reduce the unanticipated consequences of new technologies. In the case of microbeads, sewage treatment plant operators could have commented before the technology was ever used, and the same substitutes that will now replace the beads could have been used from the start. How many other easily replaceable technologies are now in use and damaging the planet? We don’t know and have no way of easily finding out.

While policy attention is focused on large, world-scale issues such as climate change, the planet continues to die the death of a thousand cuts. We ignore the day-to-day destruction that derives from an economic paradigm that has not yet internalized the need to assess the environmental impacts of new technologies and products. It is clear that the hunger for economic growth and wealth pushes business and governments to ignore environmental impacts that are considered an inevitable byproduct of development. But this fails to account for the costs that will inevitably be borne when the damage must be cleaned up. A more careful production process with pollution control technologies may cost more in the short run, but it saves money in the long run. And to the degree that businesses are convinced that they must adhere to environmental standards to avoid sanctions, they will push their engineers and production managers to develop innovative methods of controlling environmental impacts.

End of pipeline effluent standards and end of smokestack emission standards are necessary to ensure environmental quality. But so too is prior testing of new technologies and products before they are permitted into the marketplace. While some toxic substances degrade and pose little long-term harm to ecosystems, others are highly persistent and find their way up the food chain and can affect human health. The success of the microbead legislation is important and indicates that it is possible for the United States Congress to find common ground and ban unneeded toxics. The deeper change needed is far tougher and is a long way off. We need to spend more money to better understand the impact of technology on the natural environment and human health. And we must ensure that new technologies are only introduced after we have assessed their impact on the planet.

See also: Plastic Debris in the Environment

Plastics Found in Every Ocean Sample

Microplastics in the Sea Water and Plastics Everywhere

From the Article by Kara Law and Richard Thompson, Science:
Vol. 345 no. 6193 pp. 144-145, July 11, 2014

Department of Oceanography, Sea Education Association, Woods Hole, MA  and School of Marine Science and Engineering, Plymouth University, Plymouth UK

Plastics litter beaches and the open ocean. Scientists are increasingly concerned about a less visible form of plastic pollution: microplastics. Microplastics arise from the deterioration of larger plastic items and from microbeads used in cosmetics. In their Perspective, Law and Thompson explain that because marine currents distribute the pollutants in unpredictable ways, trends in microplastic pollution are difficult to measure. Microplastics can contain harmful chemicals and may also release toxic additives used in their manufacture. They are ingested by and can poison many marine organisms. We are currently unable, and may never be able, to remove microplastics from the oceans. We thus need to understand the environmental effects of this major pollutant in the hope of mitigating its worst effects.

Plastic debris in the marine environment is more than just an unsightly problem. Images of beach litter and large floating debris may first come to mind, but much recent concern about plastic pollution has focused on microplastic particles too small to be easily detected by eye. Microplastics are likely the most numerically abundant items of plastic debris in the ocean today, and quantities will inevitably increase, in part because large, single plastic items ultimately degrade into millions of microplastic pieces. Microplastics are of environmental concern because their size (millimeters or smaller) renders them accessible to a wide range of organisms at least as small as zooplankton, with potential for physical and toxicological harm.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Research Institute Finds Plastic in Every Ocean Sample From Bermuda to Iceland, from EcoWatch.com, July 3, 2014

A crew of 14 scientists, filmmakers, journalists and others successfully sailed from Bermuda to Iceland and found exactly what they were looking for—an astounding amount of plastic on oceanic floors.

The group gathered by the 5 Gyres Institute reached Iceland earlier this week after a three-week, plastic-pollution research voyage across the North Atlantic and sub-polar Gyres. Simply put, the researchers found microplastic particles in every surface sample collected during the trip, which spanned 2,500 nautical miles.

“As we’ve seen in our other expeditions across the five subtropical gyres or ‘garbage patches,’ plastic pollution is ubiquitous in the world’s oceans,” said Dr. Marcus Eriksen, 5 Gyres co-Founder, research director, expedition leader and principal investigator.

“Even in the subpolar gyre, which contains far less plastic than other regions we’ve surveyed, we’re still finding particles in every sample. Plastic pollution is the new baseline for our ocean environment.”

The Institute hopes its findings will lead to change just like a previous expedition that lead to the “Ban the Bead” campaign and voluntary microbead phase-outs from Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble and other companies used the tiny beads in cosmetic products. Earlier this month, the State of Illinois announced a ban on the manufacturing and sale of products containing microbeads.

“Every sample of ocean water we’ve collected is riddled with plastic,” said Allison Cook, director of engagement for The Story of Stuff Project and expedition participant. “I’ll admit that the tiny plastic pieces are not particularly impressive on their own. Yet, when I think about how vast this ocean is and how small a path we are traversing, the consequences of all of those tiny bits of plastic boggle the mind and deflate the spirit.”

The group has also been studying the subsurface distribution of microplastics, the impact of plastics on foraging fish and testing new collection equipment at sea.

“Research is costly at sea. When we have the opportunity to do our work, I seek collaborations with the global scientific network, collecting samples for my colleagues who concentrate on related fields of study to plastic pollution,” Eriksen said. “With these partnerships, we can further our scientific understanding of plastic pollution while managing the costs associated with data collection in the most remote parts of the world.”

Braskem's Ethylene XXI Project (Mexico)

Braskem WV project may match Ethylene XXI in Mexico

From the Article by Joseph Chang, ICIS News, March 20, 2014

SAO PAULO, Brazil (ICIS)–The planned Ascent project in West Virginia, to be built by Brazil’s industrial conglomerate Odebrecht and operated by Braskem – could be on the scale of the Ethylene XXI project in Mexico, according to the chief executive of Braskem.

“The Ethylene XXI project in Mexico could be a good indicator of the scale of Ascent,” said Carlos Fadigas, CEO of Braskem, in an interview with ICIS at Braskem headquarters. “Ascent will be focused on PE [polyethylene] and we want flexibility of production grades,” he added.

Mexico’s Ethylene XXI project, 75:25 joint venture between Braskem and Grupo Idesa, involves a 1.05m tonne/year cracker, two high density PE (HDPE) plants with capacities of 350,000 tonnes/year and 400,000 tonnes/year, as well as one 300,000 tonne/year low density PE (LDPE) plant.

The Ethylene XXI project is 60-62% complete and scheduled to start up in the third quarter of 2015, Fadigas said. [It is a $4.2 billion project, according to Plastics News.]

The Ascent (Appalachian Shale Cracker Enterprise) project is part of Braskem’s strategy to use more gas-based feedstocks and extend its PE reach to the US. The company currently has five polypropylene (PP) plants in the US but no PE production.

All Braskem’s PE production of around 3m tonnes/year is in Brazil. “We have a PP plant in West Virginia, and a technical center in Pittsburgh. We have seen the development of shale gas all around us in Pennsylvania and want to take part,” said Fadigas.

Braskem has a “creative agreement” with Odebrecht, which is a major shareholder in Braskem, said the CEO. “Odebrecht will carry the asset and debt, but we want the petrochemical risk – the profit associated with the asset,” Fadigas said.

The arrangement is similar to Braskem’s deal with US midstream company Enterprise Products, which is building a 750,000 tonne/year propane dehydrogenation plant (PDH) plant in Texas by 2015, he noted.

“There we will be buying the propylene at producer economics. Enterprise wants to make sure its investment has a fixed income profile. They will transfer all the petrochemical risk to us,” said Fadigas.

Braskem will buy around half the propylene output of the PDH plant, which will supply about half the demand from its three PP plants in Texas, he added.