Kapok | Not so fantastic anymore

Eric Sautedé

One of my fellow columnists with the Times has made the fight against the abusive usage of plastic an all-out effort, very often taking a very personal tone. Contrary to the Belgium song, plastic is not that fantastic anymore and we should actually be considering totally banning it from our life. If Plastic Free July is such a great initiative, it is so not only because it strikingly demonstrates that we can “easily” do without the convenience of organic polymers — cheap, malleable and resistant, and yet awfully and irremediably polluting — but that recycling is not enough and what needs to change is our social and economic behavior at large.

In a ground-breaking study published in Sciences Advances in July 2017, a group of researchers was able to estimate that humanity had produced some 6,3 billion metric tons of plastic waste since 1950, and that only 9% of these had effectively been recycled, 12% incinerated, and no less than a staggering 79% accumulated in landfills or the natural environment. By 2025, the cumulative recycling rate should amount to 20%, and projecting the current global waste management trends, even though we will be able to recycle some 44% of our plastic waste by 2050, by then we will have also accumulated some 12 billion metric tons of discarded plastic waste scattered in the midst of mother nature!

The image of a straw stuck in the nose of a turtle might provide a terrific imagination grabber targeted at five-year-olds and their hurried parents — our era oscillates between the empathy for the cute and the indifference to barbarity — but as a more politicized journalist recently remarked: “Coca Cola produces on its own some 128 billion plastic bottles per year! When put one on top of the other, these bottles amount to one hundred times the distance from the Earth to the Moon…” Even though some countries are doing better than others — Norway already recycles 43.4% of its plastic waste — it is indisputable that the ability to recycle everything we manufacture is everything but a chimeric dream. Sorry for all the new evangelists of circular economy, but the future lies in reducing the amount of filth we are dropping on the green planet!

I was thus very proud when on October 2 the French National Assembly approved the law banning single-usage plastic “cutlery, meat picks, box covers, trays, ice-cream pots, salad cups, boxes and stirrers” by January 1 2020. This list complements the cotton sticks and single usage plastic glasses, cups and plates which were already destined to be axed by that date. Fifty micron thick plastic bags had already been removed from cashiers as well as fruits and vegetables stalls respectively in 2016 and 2017. But then, France only recycles 22.2% of its plastic waste and one could argue that being an advanced economy, it had had plenty of time to pollute without really caring.

However, I just came back from India, and guess what? Twenty-five out the country’s twenty-nine states have already put in place various bans on the manufacture, supply, storage and use of plastics! India’s Environment Minister has already announced that by 2022, his country would “eliminate all single use plastics.” In Mumbai, 225 municipal civil servants dressed in purple have been tracking offenders to the law since June 2018, and if this does not sound almighty in a city of 21 million dwellers, those confronted to fines ranging from Rs5,000 (half a median monthly salary) to Rs25,000 for recidivists seem to be taking the scheme seriously, be them manufacturers, distributors or consumers. In Goa, the manufacturing of 50 micron and thinner plastic bags has actually been prohibited by law since 2016, and even political parties have been made responsible for managing the waste generated by their campaign activities! 

In Macao, civic groups are mobilizing and taking stock of the filthy wasteful habits registered in the SAR, but why would the territory be left to the goodwill of a few casinos, even with the best of intentions? Is a gold-plated plastic landfill our only horizon?