Video: Is Plastic Sustainable? - By The British Plastics Federation
By Shardell Joseph
The British Plastics Federation (BPF) has released two videos to to help tackle some of the public misunderstandings around plastic, addressing its role in society and the best ways to prevent plastic waste.
The video’s were released after an international debate on plastic waste at the World Economic Forum last week, in support of the BPF’s recent document Understanding the Debate about Plastic, which outlines why plastic is important for modern life and the evidence on effective ways to reduce waste.
Video: Improving Plastic Recycling in the UK - By The British Plastics Federation
YouGov findings recently revealed over two-thirds of the public believe that plastic packaging is the most damaging material for producing carbon emissions during its lifecycle. Research into the environmental impact of plastic, however, disproved this, and indicated that that replacing plastic with other materials is not necessarily better for the environment. Academics have also cautioned against swapping plastic for other materials due to the unforeseen negative consequences it may have for the planet.
‘We hope that through widely sharing content such as these videos, we can help clear up public misunderstanding about plastic,’ said British Plastics Federation Director General, Philip Law. ‘The recent YouGov poll results show the issue clearly - most do not appreciate plastic’s role in helping us reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
‘Policymakers and the media need to take note. By turning away from plastics we may do a lot more harm to our environment than good. We must ensure we work together to make the best choices for our planet, and plastic has an important role to play in fighting climate change.’
ok so people are making fun of this but adding this with other anti-global warming tactics will work
This isn’t adding ice just for the sake of denial, it’s adding to the Earth’s albedo. This in turn actually makes the Earth’s climate cooler, and then more ice will be produced naturally because of this.
It isn’t a process we need to continue forever, in fact it’s one that needs to be calculated so that we don’t do it TOO MUCH. The only worry would be cooling down too much.
So yes, this is a good idea. It simply isn’t the only thing we should do because we still have gross pollution.
For the love of god do it . anything just do it. Give us hope.
Here’s the thing: Most environmental catastrophes humans have ever or are currently creating can be fixed. It’s not just a matter of “oh no, things are ruined, and maybe we can stop the degradation so that things don’t get any worse, but we’re stuck with how things are.” There are some things we can’t do, like bringing back extinct species. But there are a lot of other things we can definitely do, many of which are being done right now. The problem is that most of our willpower and effort is spent on bullshit tiny things that won’t solve the problem (individual recycling, etc.) and not on the large-scale things that can and will make a large-scale difference.
Ice caps are melting? Guess what! We know how to make ice. It’s not that hard. Designing mostly-automated robot ships to go to the poles and rebuild the ice caps is well within our current technical capabilities. We just need to fund it.
Deforestation on a massive scale? Destruction of other biomes? Guess what! We know how to plant trees. We know how to plant grasslands. We know how to take barren, lifeless land and turn it back into a viable biome. It’s not that hard. In a lot of cases, if there’s neighboring areas where that biome still exists, all you have to do is dump a few tons of biomass (plant clippings, food waste, etc.) on the barren land and stand back and wait. The biomass will provide nutrients and keep the topsoil from blowing away, and the plants and animals from the neighboring biome will move in. In two decades, even if you don’t do anything besides dumping the biomass on it, you won’t be able to tell what was the barren area and what was the still-existing biome.
Coral reefs dying? Now, coral reefs are a bit more fragile than most biomes, but guess what! We still know how to replant/rebuild them, and in fact are working on that in places affected by coral reef die-off! And we’re learning how to do it better every day.
Desertification? Guess what! We know how to turn desert back into green space. They’re doing it on a large scale in China and sub-Saharan Africa. There are several different techniques, none of which are even very technology-intensive. It takes money and time and labor, but it’s perfectly doable. We know this because we’ve done it.
Plastic in the ecosystem, particularly in the ocean? Guess what! There’s a lot of people working on this, both on “how to remove plastic from the ocean” and “how to reuse/recycle it more efficiently.” And the techniques are improving by leaps and bounds every year. This is a solvable problem. These are all solvable problems.
So if you’re crushed by the weight of the coming environmental catastrophe … don’t be. These are all solvable problems! We can stop things from getting worse, and we can fix the things we’ve broken. The issue is political, not practical.
On the political side, of course, is the need to tighten up environmental regulations across the globe. (What’s the statistic, that 90% of pollution is caused by 100 corporations?) And then of course, we need to fund these programs on a large enough scale.
In some ways the political aspect is the hardest, but consider this: we are at a tipping point. Things are changing about the way politicians talk about climate change and ecological degradation. More ordinary people are concerned about this, which means more pressure on politicians. One of the ways that things are changing is that people–even conservatives–are starting to talk about “job opportunities in new green fields” and switching the conversation so that it’s not “rainforest vs. jobs” makes political action a lot more possible. And no, it’s not going to happen on its own, but it canhappen.
This is a solvable problem.
I *needed* this. Climate change has had me feeling SO helpless, having a list of things that can actually potentially be done is beautiful
I just want to yell into the void that I am fucking sick to death of governments promising to do things about climate change by year X. Reducing emissions by year X. Promising to work on it later with no plan and no budget and no fucking commitment.
Enough empty promises! Stop buying time to placate people! ACTION. I WANT ACTION. Put your goddamn money where your mouth is and start implementing clean renewable energy sources! Fine the FUCK out of companies that are killing the planet until they are economically forced to change! I want to see the changes with my own eyes.
Enough of these bullshit lies promising to make changes in ten years, twenty years, thirty years. NOW. Make the changes NOW.
Broomfield: Question 300 would impose a five-year prohibition on all fracking.
Fort Collins: Its measure would create a five-year moratorium on fracking and storage of waste products related to the oil and gas industry in town.
City of Boulder: 2H proposes a five-year moratorium on oil and gas exploration.
Lafayette: Question No. 300 would ban new oil and gas wells in town. [As well as] prohibit “depositing, storing or transporting within city limits any water, brine, chemical or by-products used in or that result from extraction of oil and gas.”
NPR turns 50 this year, so we’re celebrating some of the movies, music and books from the year of our birth, 1971 – like Dr. Seuss’s sadly prophetic The Lorax, which is even more prescient now in the wake of the recent U.N. climate report.
Our own Elizabeth Blair talked to scientists, environmentalists and educators about the book’s legacy – people like Mark Gozonsky, a writer and high school English teacher in Los Angeles whose students have analyzedThe Lorax in the context of global warming. “He kind of says ‘I told you so,’ like, I told you this was going to be bad and now it’s bad,” Gozonsky says. “The book ends on a question mark … 'Well, what are you going to do about it?’ And that’s the very question mark that we land on today.”
The world is spending at least $1.8 trillion every year on subsidies driving the annihilation of wildlife and a rise in global heating, according to a new study, prompting warnings that humanity is financing its own extinction.
From tax breaks for beef production in the Amazon to financial support for unsustainable groundwater pumping in the Middle East, billions of pounds of government spending and other subsidies are harming the environment […]. This government support, equivalent to 2% of global GDP, is directly working against the goals of the Paris agreement and draft targets on reversing biodiversity loss, the research on explicit subsidies found, effectively financing water pollution, land subsidence and deforestation with state money.
The authors, who are leading subsidies experts, say a significant portion of the $1.8tn could be repurposed to support policies that are beneficial for nature and a transition to net zero, amid growing political division about the cost of decarbonising the global economy.
“Nature is declining at an alarming rate, and we have never lived on a planet with so little biodiversity,” [the former head of the UN climate change convention] said. “[…] The report highlights how redirecting, repurposing, or eliminating subsidies could make an important contribution to unlocking the $711 billion required each year to halt and reverse the loss of nature by 2030 as well as the cost of reaching net zero emissions.”
With over 125 million views in the month (roughly) since it was released, Lil Dicky’s music video Earth certainly is getting quite a bit of attention, especially (or so I’m told) in the tweenager/young-teenager crowd. The video draws on a wealth of big-name star power, profanity (although there is a “clean” version for children with 16 million views), and humor to convey its “globalized” pro-Earth/pro-Environmental message to a younger audience, before ending with a message about global warming and the twelve-year deadline, with a link to take action through WeLoveTheEarth.org. While there are certainly quite a few issues one might take with the song lyrics and visual representation, what I want to explore are not only the limitations implicit in this approach (namely a very Global North/Ameri-centric “globalized” imaginary, an obscuring of capitalist/corporate responsibility for climate change in favor of a neoliberal individual actions model, a maintaining of the Human/Nature binary, and a focus on a young audience when older demographics are perhaps more in need of convincing), but also the strengths of this approach and why, perhaps, it may be useful to step back and let these “meme-friendly” call-to-arms proliferate, rather than critiquing imperfect representations to death.
Ultimately, because I can see both how strong both the limitations and possibilities to these various approaches are, I am undecided on what the “correct” course of action may be. I recognize that the stakes are higher in this for some than for others–both in the sense that lack of action disproportionately is affecting certain communities, who therefore are more invested in results over perfect representation, as well as the way that because of the disproportionate effects of inaction, certain communities may find it less viable to overlook (and therefore further obscure) these inequalities; because of this, I am certainly not in any position to draw firm conclusions, and what follows is intended to be an exploration which I hope will invite a broader conversation.
Okay so let me start with a rundown of the limitations; while there are several points I’m making here, I am honestly going to try to keep each as succinct as possible because I think these may be more obvious than the benefits (that being said, I’m more than happy to delve into these points further if anyone has any questions or feels they do need to be made more visible). First, lets look at the “globalized” imaginary. The song’s chorus goes:
Earth, it is our planet (It’s our planet) We love the Earth (We love the Earth), it is our home (Home) We love the Earth, it is our planet (It is our planet) We love the Earth, it is our home We love the Earth
Other lines include “We love you, India/Africa/the Chinese,” the humorous “We forgive you, Germany,” and “C'mon everybody, I know we’re not all the same / But we’re living on the same Earth.” These lines simultaneously call for a globalized action, while also imagining a) that something quasi-globalized already exists and b) that “differences” are the reason we have not fully come together. Frederick Cooper has an amazing article which I highly recommend called “What Is the Concept of Globalization Good for? An African Historian’s Perspective,” and one of his arguments which is especially relevant here is that “a ‘globalizing’ language stood alongside a structure of domination and exploitation that was lumpy in the extreme” (204). What does it mean, in this context, to say “we love the Earth,” let alone “we love you, India/Africa/China”? Listing Global South nations which often bare the brunt of capitalist/colonialist industrial exploitation might be intended to acknowledge the uneven effects global warming has on marginalized communities (what Rob Nixon has termed “slow violence”); but then why is Germany on the list (other than for the comedic effect), and more importantly who is the “we” who “loves” these nations, and what does that “love” amount to? I think constantly of Elizabeth Catte’s comment in What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, that she felt paranoid traveling for academic conferences that she would bring the smell of the coal industry with her, and give herself away as someone who wasn’t worth not being poisoned. Love is a beautiful idea to invoke, but do “we” “love” the Global South enough to stop poisoning “them”? And what about the poor in the Global North?
The lack of definition of “we” contributes to my second problem with the song/video: while I do not mean to undermine the absolute value individual actions have towards improving the environment, the opening of the song focuses on litter and the fumes exuded by personal vehicles. There is no direct reference to the kinds of waste and pollution created by corporations.
Thirdly, the lyrics contain a laundry list of humorous animal descriptions such as “Hi, I’m a baboon I’m like a man, just less advanced and my anus is huge.” While obviously intended to be funny, these descriptions reify the Human/Animal and Human/Nature divide and contribute to binary logics. One of the criticisms of the “Anthropocene” narrative is that it seperates “humanity” from “nature” in ways which obscure the entanglement actually involved in environmental networks. This is not in any way to imply that human actions and systems are not responsible for global warming (whether you put the blame on humanity in general as in the Anthropocene or specific individuals acting through capitalism as in the Capitalocene there is no denying that climate crisis is happening because of human action); rather, the problem here is that it this binary attempts to imagine a separateness between humans and nature which is not useful in addressing climate change, because it obscures the intricacy of interaction and allows us to vastly oversimplify what we see as viable solutions.
Finally, the video and lyrics are clearly intended to draw in a younger demographic, and yet polls have shown that there is an age gap in concern about climate change which trends towards younger populations.
That being said, let’s look at why this video may be a good and necessary thing, despite the potential drawbacks. First, even though younger people tend to already believe in and be more concerned about climate change than older folks, studies have shown that children change their parents’ minds about climate change, so convincing children/teens to care about climate change and to talk about it with their parents does have a measurable impact on the opinions of older adults. This leads to why the humorous lyrics and video may be particularly useful, despite the problematics outlined above. At this moment in time, social media and memes in particular are a particularly powerful political weapon. Mother Jones recently ran an article titled ““The Left Can’t Meme”: How Right-Wing Groups Are Training the Next Generation of Social Media Warriors” which outlines the role memes have played in perpetuating conservative and far-right thought and manifesting conservative/far-right desires. Memes are “cheap, subversive, and designed to provoke an emotional response, memes are a disruptive form of information guerrilla warfare.” Another article discussing “The Evolution of Political Internet Memes” argues that “memes are likely to gain more importance in a post-text future. Younger generations are shifting more and more to visual platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat. Images are therefore more likely shape their views on politics and politicians.” For these reasons, a song/music video such as Earth which is likely to draw in a large audience of kids/teens due to star power (everyone from Justin Bieber to Halsey to Kevin Hart makes an appearance), humor, and catchy tune is likely to make an impact on children and therefore their parents. Furthering this point, the website linked at the end of the music video presents itself in a far more professional manner–this is what parents are more likely to be looking at (and potentially donating to, and taking advice from) than the song itself.
So again, I’m not sure whether this benefit outweighs the oversimplifications presented through the lyrics/video but I do think they’re worth considering, and I absolutely invite further conversation on this matter. Do we need to follow the conservative meme-model of making politics more easily legible/accessible? Or does this model further obscure the struggles of marginalized folks and render invisible issues that need to be brought to light and challenged? Is there a (better) way to balance this?
NASA’sinteractiveImages of Change gallery “features images of different locations on planet Earth, showing change over time periods ranging from centuries to days. Some of these effects are related to climate change, some are not. Some document the effects of urbanization, or the ravage of natural hazards such as fires and floods. All show our planet in a state of flux.”
On Earth Day, April 22, Climate Activist Wynn Bruce self-immolated in front of the Supreme Court building in Washington DC.
I saw little coverage in relation to this act. I don’t think it’s right to stifle the selfless action of an individual consumed by concern for the planet; especially as it was his last act on this earth.
I have been working on these pieces since I heard about the incident, and I really didn’t want to release them until I was truly satisfied, as I wanted to do as much justice as possible to the issue.
Art makes ugly issues easier to digest. It can serve as a subtle reminder without forcing the viewer to see the violence of the issue head on.
I hope the message Wynn Bruce was trying to convey spread to the right people. I hope it wasn’t in vain.
Amid dire warnings of mass extinctions and ecological catastrophe, the migratory flights of monarch butterflies are vanishing. Habitat loss, insecticides, and increasing temperatures are all threatening monarch butterfly populations. Are the butterflies resilient enough to rebound from the precipitous decline they have experienced?
This latest SCI Energy Group blog introduces the possible avenues of carbon dioxide utilisation, which entails using carbon dioxide to produce economically valuable products through industrial processes. Broadly, utilisation can be categorised into three applications: chemical use, biological use and direct use. For which, examples of each will be highlighted throughout.
Before proceeding to introduce these, we can first consider utilisation in relation to limiting climate change. As has been discussed in previous blogs, the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions is crucial. Therefore, for carbon dioxide utilisation technologies to have a beneficial impact on climate change, several important factors must be considered and addressed.
1)Energy Source: Often these processes are energy intensive. Therefore, this energy must come from renewable resources or technologies.
2)Scale: Utilisation technologies must exhibit large scaling potential to match the limited timeframe for climate action.
3)Permanence: Technologies which provide permanent removal or displacement of CO2 emissions will be most impactful¹.
Figure 1: CO2 sign
Chemical Uses
Carbon dioxide, alongside other reactants, can be chemically converted into useful products. Examples of which include urea, methanol, and plastics and polymers. One of the primary uses of urea includes agricultural fertilisers which are pivotal to crop nutrition. Most commonly, methanol is utilised as a chemical feedstock in industrial processes.
Figure 2: Fertilizing soil
One of the key challenges faced with this application of utilisation is the low reactivity of CO2 in its standard conditions. Therefore, to successfully convert it into products of economic value, catalysts are required to significantly lower the molecules activation energy and overall energy consumption of the process. With that being said, it is anticipated that, in future, the chemical conversion of CO2 will have an important role in maintaining a secure supply of fuel and chemical feedstocks such as methanol and methane².
Biological Uses
Carbon dioxide is fundamental to plant growth as it provides a source of required organic compounds. For this reason, it can be utilised in greenhouses to promote carbonic fertilisation. By injecting increased levels of CO2 into the air supplied to greenhouses, the yield of plant growth has been seen to increase. Furthermore, CO2 from the flue gas streams of chemical processes has been recognised, in some studies, to be of a quality suitable for direct injection³.
These principles are applicable to encouraging the growth of microorganisms too. One example being microalgae which boasts several advantageous properties. Microalgae has been recognised for its ability to grow in diverse environments as well as its ability to be cultured in numerous types of bioreactors. Furthermore, its production rate is considerably high meaning a greater demand for CO2 is exhibited than that from normal plants. Micro-algal biomass can be utilised across a range of industries to form a multitude of products. These include bio-oils, fuels, fertilisers, food products, plant feeds and high value chemicals. However, at present, the efficiency of CO2 fixation, in this application, can be as low as 20-50%.
Figure 4: Illustration of microalgae under the microscope
Direct Uses
It is important to note that, at present, there are many mature processes which utilise CO2 directly. Examples of which are shown in the table below.
Summary
Many carbon dioxide utilisation technologies exist, across a broad range of industrial applications. For which, some are well-established, and others are more novel. For such technologies to have a positive impact on climate action, several factors need to be addressed such as their energy source, scaling potential and permanence of removal/ displacement of CO2.
The chemistry of carbon dioxide and its role in decarbonisation is a key topic of interest for SCI Energy Group. In the near future, we will be running a webinar concerned with this. Further details of this will be posted on the SCI website in due course.
Reace Edwards is a member of SCI’s Energy group and a PhD Chemical Engineering student at the University of Chester. Read more about her involvement with SCI here or watch her recent TEDx Talk here.
