It’s bad enough that the world stacks, dumps and burns mountains of gallon milk jugs, water bottles, package wrappers and take-out food containers every day. But after we finish our last bites, many of those plastic bits make it into the oceans, where they break down into small, fish-food-size pieces — enough to choke a seahorse.
And without even a side of salsa to season the plastic chips.
Technology has figured out how to put a computer on our wrists, store thousands of photographs in a smartphone and create software that can answer complex questions — though not always correctly. But it hasn’t yet solved the dilemma of plastic waste.
Maybe the answer is more about reusing and reshaping than technology.
We like new and clean, and we don’t like thinking about what happens to whatever we toss into the trash. And while there are markets to recycle paper and cardboard into new products, aluminum into new cans and glass into fill material, plastics are a tougher piece of the recycling menu to chew — especially in Alaska, where the costs of shipping it out exceed its scrap value.
Doing good for the environment is heartwarming and helpful, but it’s not realistic to expect nonprofits to lose money on recycling.
In Haines, the nonprofit Friends of Recycling has amassed a seven-ton pile of plastic in hopes that someday the group will have a solution to the waste. Without a market to sell the collection, the organization has been storing its stash for a year and a half, hoping something will change.
In Juneau, recyclers have been shipping plastics Outside at a loss for the past couple of years. If the financial cost doesn’t turn around, the plastic could return to its old home — the landfill.
No organization in Wrangell tries to collect plastic for recycling — they could not afford to lose money.
For plastic that isn’t recycled, buried in a landfill or burned, a lot of it finds its way into the oceans, where sunlight and the churning water break it down into small pieces. It’s a “plastic smog,” in the words of international researchers who released a study last week.
Those trillions of plastic particles weigh roughly 2.6 million tons and are doubling about every six years, according to the study which drew on nearly 12,000 samples collected across 40 years of research in all the world’s major ocean basins.
Plastic bags, packaging and food containers slowly break down into smaller and smaller pieces, called microplastics, less than a quarter-inch long and easily swallowed by foraging marine life. Yes, even small seahorses get tangled up in our waste.
“Plastic is a wonderful product because it lasts. It’s also a really horrible product because it lasts,” Haines Friends of Recycling board chair Melissa Aronson told the Chilkat Valley News.
The nonprofit has an idea to make plastics last, but as a different product. The group is looking at maybe getting a plastics recycling machine to melt the leftovers and make plastic lumber for picnic tables, decking and benches. The machine could cost an estimated $65,000 to $75,000, which means fundraising and grants to pay the bill.
Though it may seem weird for a community in Southeast Alaska to talk about plastic benches and decks in the middle of the largest national forest in the country, it could be an answer to the area’s plastic problem. Shipping plastic to Haines, or maybe adding a second machine in southern Southeast, is worthy of regional consideration.
A new bench could be a solid recycling plank to stand on.
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