Environment

Plastic Fails to Fill Recycling Promise

This past week, The Wall Street Journal, reported on a PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic recycling plant in Spartanburg, S.C. built to meet the demands for recycling plastics. What started out as a promise to push PET products like beverage bottles from landfills (and our oceans) and back into reusable materials, has fallen miserably short. Centered on Coca-Cola’s promise to recycle 100% of its bottles and cans by 2020, the article focused on the challenges of  getting plastic out of our trash and into recycling facilities like the one here in S.C.  Unlike glass, which can be endlessly recycled and not lose its quality, plastic recycling requires type-based separation or it can be deemed defective and defect cannot be reused for product packaging.  It’s not just the mixing of plastics that’s the issue – simply put – not enough of our plastics are making it out of the trash and into the recycling bin.

A few points that stood out:

  • As a nation, we recycle a smaller percentage of bottles today than we did in 1995.
  • Coca-Cola’s bottles contain less PET recycled content today than they did 5 years ago – 5% versus 10%.
  • PepsiCo’s bottles contain only 10% recycled PET.
  • The U.S. recycling rate for plastic bottles made from PET, typically derived from petroleum, was 28% in 2009.

You can read the whole WSJ article here, or watch the video with reporter Mike Esterel.

What’s clear is that while we wait for incentive-based programs like bottle-deposits,
or we wait for better access to convenient recycling, or while we wait for engineers to find ways to better recycle plastics, our landfills and oceans are filling up with the nearly 75% of plastic that ends up in the trash.

What can we do? Here are 3 things you can do to help put plastics where they belong:

  1. Limit the plastic you consume. Choose and use a reusable glass bottle whenever possible. Use glass food storage containers and limit purchasing ‘convenience sized’ products which are usually plastic-wrapped and highly wasteful.
  2. Recycle. If you have to use plastic, we hope you’ll recycle it at your curbside, or in public recycling centers.
  3. Reward.  If you live in one of the 10 states with a bottle-deposit reward program, take advantage and get that coin back in your pocket. If you’re in one of the 40 states without such a program, write your state elected officials and get
    rewarded for recycling.  (States with bottle-deposit reward programs have on average 2x the plastic recycling rate of states without such a program.)

 

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Tapped – The Real Story of Your Bottled Water

Sometimes the only way we get to the truth, the way we get behind the marketing, ad campaigns and propaganda is through truth-tellers. We share with you some of the best reasons to evolve beyond plastic – your health, the environment, cost savings and more. But sometimes the visual story tells us more and moves us to more urgent action. The documentary Trapped is one of those visual stories sharing the truth of your plastic bottled water. Not only are plastic bottles leaching chemicals, clogging our landfills, floating in our oceans, but the about40% of bottled water is nothing more than tap water. That’s right, the same stuff that comes out of your faucet.  So check out the trailer, then check out the film and tell us what you think.

 

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The Cost of Plastics in Our Oceans

There are so many organizations helping to raise the awareness of the damage done by plastics to our health and our environment. Our friends at the Surfrider Foundation, have a great Rise Against Plastics campaign, asking folks to pledge an effort to end their use of single-use plastics.  What we had to share though, was this creative and compelling video that, in a very simple way, shows the damage to marine life of plastics in our oceans.

What other great projects have you heard about?

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Of Mice and Men: How BPA Makes Men Less Attractive

Today, the news was released from a very interesting study from researchers at University of Missouri – turns out the BPA (bisphenol-A), found in plastics, can make men less attractive to women. While the researchers tested the theory on male deer mice, we humans can learn quite a bit from their reactions.

The unversity study found that male deer mice exposed to BPA through their mother’s diet exhibited compromised spatial learning abilities, a dominant trait exhibited in males. So these BPA-exposed males had a harder time finding females in the laboratory. To quote the researchers:

The disruption of male spatial cognition and the supporting brain systems would severely compromise the ability of the male deer mice to find mates in natural settings, and even if they did locate females, such animals would seem to be less likely to be chosen as mates than males that had not been exposed to BPA.

And, perhaps most disturbingly, both BPA-exposed and control females preferred the clean males to BPA-exposed males. BPA-exposed males were rejected 2 to 1 by the females in the study. In very simple language, BPA makes male deer mice less attractive to the female deer mice.

We’ve seen BPA and plastics linked with breast cancer, infertility and early puberty in females. Now we’re seeing it affect men’s brains and our attractiveness as well.

Even noted author John Steinbeck couldn’t have imagined this link between mice and men.

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Video: Breast Cancer and the Link to Plastics

Once again, the links between plastics and our health are making headlines. In a recent article in Slate magazine shared:

Recent studies show that some pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and plastic additives appear to change when and how the mammary gland develops. Even low doses, close to what average Americans are exposed to currently, have been linked to altered development, cell growth, and gene expression in animal mammary glands. The chemicals include the notorious baby-bottle chemical bisphenol A, dioxin (a by-product from burning plastic and a common food contaminant), phthalates (plastic additives), atrazine (a top-selling herbicide in the United States, now banned in Europe), flame retardants, and stain repellants. PFOA, a common chemical used to make Teflon, appears to delay puberty in animal pups and reduce the size of the mammary gland, while chemicals that mimic estrogen may accelerate puberty.

Just reading that one paragraph, reminded of this great TED talk from Jeanne Rizzo, the CEO of Breast Cancer Fund:

What do you think?

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