Environmental Question #5 [Plastic Pollution]

Courtesy of Reddit user u/Grandemestizo

Q: How worried should I be about plastic in the environment? Because I’m pretty worried about it.

Also, what is the most environmentally friendly way to dispose of materials which are not biodegradable and cannot be recycled?

A: The history of humanity is a story of us getting gradually better at not poisoning ourselves and our ecosystems. I expand on this idea in my article here. If you look back in time we went from pooping in the same rivers we drank from and wondering why people kept getting sick, to using mercury in hat manufacturing and breathing soot without masks which gave us mad hatters and black lung, to using lead in gasoline and paint which caused generations of cognitive problems particularly for children. In the modern era we know about and mostly avoid the dangers of bacterial infections, mercury, smoke inhalation, and lead poisoning, because we have grown smarter and more responsible about pollution very slowly.

The modern problems we face with plastic pollution are very serious and as a society we need to do everything we can to fix them, but the problem of pollution in general isn't new and as a society we have been working on fixing pollution for a very long time. Part of the insidious nature of modern pollution is that it is actually less toxic than the pollution of the past, so the effects aren't as apparent and don't spur action as strongly. For mercury poisoning and black lung for example, those diseases were so obvious and horrific that it was common knowledge to people at the time that every hat maker, miner, and chimney sweep would develop those diseases in their lifetimes. That caused people to avoid those jobs if they could, and it spurred the people in those jobs to loudly demand safer working conditions.

Since modern plastic pollution is less acutely toxic to people and the environment than pollution of the past, the effects aren't as obvious, so we don't really know how the world will be affected by it. All we know for sure is that the effects will be slow, subtle, and malignant. For the first time in history though, the most toxic things in our world have been mostly handled so we can afford to care about ridding the world of comparatively mild toxins like plastics. 

So the short version answer is you don't live in a clean world, but you live in a cleaner world than your parents did, so you don't need to live your life in constant fear. Yeah, we all have microplastics in our blood, but our parents had far worse stuff than that in theirs. Pollution of all kinds, including plastic pollution, will get better like they always have, it will just go way slower than it should, just like it always has. 

(As a side note about climate change, it can often sound from the news that we live in the dirtiest and most dangerous era in history. In the developed world, that isn't really the case, we live in pretty much the cleanest era ever. HOWEVER, Mother Earth has a much longer memory than we do. Today we are paying the price for all of the damage that has been done over the past 200+ years that our ancestors caused and ignored. Unfortunately our ancestors racked up so much environmental debt during their lifetimes that it isn't enough for us to be the cleanest era in history, we need to be so clean that we both leave no impact at all and pay literally and figuratively to fix the damage caused by several generations before us.)

To your question about how to throw things away, if it can't be composted or recycled then throwing it in the regular trash is the best and only option. As the name of the sub suggests though, your goal should be to consume as little as you can manage so you throw out as little as you can. True zero waste most likely won't be possible in our lifetime, the technology for it just isn't ready, but fortunately the Earth is tougher than we sometimes give it credit for. Ecosystems can handle some trash if it's disposed of properly because well maintained landfills use concrete walls and such to separate them from the surrounding ecosystems. The problem is we throw away more stuff than the world can handle safely, so to fix that the answer is to minimize what we throw out, maximize biodegradable and recyclable materials, and fund research to replace more and more non-sustainable materials with sustainable ones.

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