The first time I heard about the “plastic island” in the northern Pacific gyre was about 20 years ago. Since then much has been written about “plastic material” in our environment and it has come to the fore locally over the last year.
The growth in the consumption of organic polymers has followed an exponential curve such as we discussed last week. It is not doubling every year but it is certainly exponential growth.
The website, Our World in Data, has graphics illustrating this. From two million tonnes per year in 1950, by 2015 we were consuming 381 million tonnes per year or polymers and are likely over 400 million tonnes per year by now.
Cumulatively, we have produced over 8.3 billion tonnes of these materials with 55 per cent having been discarded and only a small fraction recycled. So you would think “de-plasticizing” our economy would be a good thing to do.
But we also want to control greenhouse gas emissions.
That means switching much of our energy production to alternatives such as wind turbines. Last year, 3800 turbine blades were sent to landfills with each weighing between five and 13 tonnes, depending on the size of the rotor or the electricity generated.
These blades are made of carbon fibre reinforced polymers – they are predominantly plastic. So if we are going to “de-plasticize” our economy, we will need to stop building wind turbines.
And electric vehicles. And high gas mileage cars. And smart phones. And computers. And the list goes on.
All of which will result in more greenhouse gas emissions.
At the heart of it, moving to a sustainable future will require us to consider the complexity of all of the problems we are trying to solve and how fixing one might lead to not being able to fix another.
As an example, using pure methane to generate power yields almost twice as much energy per unit of carbon dioxide compared to coal. Why would anyone argue against using methane to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while we transition to other sources of energy? And yet, people do.
The crux of the matter is that any environmental issue is a complex problem without simple singular solutions but driven by the exponential growth in population and consumption.
