Every human on earth ingests a credit card’s worth of plastic each week

March 4, 2020 2:45 AM

PLANET PLASTIC - How Big Oil and Big Soda kept a global environmental calamity a secret for decades. By Tim Dickinson, from Rolling Stone
posted by growabrain (32 comments total)

this seems bad
posted by DoctorFedora at 3:44 AM on March 4, 2020 [7 favorites]

Decades of companies not following the law now means that you must eat plastic to maintain Shell's profitability, citizen.
posted by eustatic at 3:56 AM on March 4, 2020 [18 favorites]

Seems to me the only thing to do is change what "corporations" are allowed to do, including remove the personal liability shield for executives and board members. Gosh I hope Warren is elected.
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:15 AM on March 4, 2020 [23 favorites]

Plastics Georg, who eats thirty million credit cards a day, is an outlier and should not be counted.
posted by Faint of Butt at 6:02 AM on March 4, 2020 [36 favorites]

I fucking hate consumer plastic.
posted by Miko at 6:02 AM on March 4, 2020 [2 favorites]

And yet a disturbing number of people in this country have been conditioned to believe that we need loosen those pesky environmental regulations.............
posted by remo at 6:41 AM on March 4, 2020 [5 favorites]

A regulation is just a tax by another name. Like how when your doctor tells you not to eat ice cream, or when someone tells you "don't look directly at the solar eclipse".

It's only when you are destroying yourself that you are truly free.
posted by Reyturner at 6:46 AM on March 4, 2020 [15 favorites]

So, is my poop recyclable, then?
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:19 AM on March 4, 2020 [2 favorites]

It's certainly less compostable :-\
posted by avalonian at 7:19 AM on March 4, 2020 [7 favorites]

At Off The Rez, the Native American themed and owned cafe at the University of Washington's Burke Museum, the plastic coffee cup lids are compostable, being made from soybeans rather than dead dinosaurs and associated plant life. Surely, there must be a way of making botanically derived substitutes.

Of course, it's still a matter of scale when you think of the sheer mass of petroleum derived plastics. We'd have to raise a new continent or two to grow all that nonfood. Hmm...

*squints at map of Antarctica*

On another note, I seem to recall a passage in Gravity's Rainbow wherein Pynchon meditated upon oil and coal as being the quintessences of Death, starting with aniline dyes made from coal tar by I.G.Farben, a force as evil if not more evil than Hitler in the novel.

See also 'I Heard Beauty Dying': The Cultural Critique of Plastic in Gravity's Rainbow.
posted by y2karl at 7:31 AM on March 4, 2020 [2 favorites]

Pssh and yet it's illegal for me to actually embed my credit card chip in my body despite not having a choice in ingesting the same material.
posted by Young Kullervo at 7:59 AM on March 4, 2020 [3 favorites]

I don’t think a five cent plastic bag tax is going to cut it, here
posted by The Whelk at 8:07 AM on March 4, 2020 [6 favorites]

How people came to believe that individual choices could save the Earth (Grist)
posted by The Whelk at 8:17 AM on March 4, 2020 [11 favorites]

As plastics break down over time, they can also absorb toxins from the environment, including PCBs.

Ah, it's that kind of article.

Single use plastics are stupid and we should reduce them. Perspective is also important.
posted by eotvos at 8:42 AM on March 4, 2020 [4 favorites]

and yet it's illegal for me to actually embed my credit card chip in my body despite not having a choice in ingesting the same material.

That was my first thought, along with the practicality of pushing my belly through the card scanner at Costco...
posted by oneswellfoop at 9:08 AM on March 4, 2020 [6 favorites]

How people came to believe that individual choices could save the Earth (Grist)

That book and the sort of individualist imperative that kicked off there (and in places like Garbage magazine) always reminds me of the greenwashing powerhouse campaign of Keep America Beautiful, which turned the blame for the corporate destruction of our environment into the personal responsibility of everyday people, as if we're supposed to solve the massive problem that the people behind that campaign (the bottling and canning industry) created. I grew up with the crying (fake) Indian guilt-tripping me and I didn't and still don't litter, but imagine if the funders of that effort had not wiped out returnable, deposit bottles in the legislatures instead of just shaming us?
posted by sonascope at 9:10 AM on March 4, 2020 [13 favorites]

my cousin's a mining guy. Every now, usually after a few drinks, I pitch him my view of an increasingly possible future -- that we'll eventually be mining landfills for all the "riches" we've been burying there over the years, our own man made version of fossil fuels. The technology's probably already there, and most of the know-how. It's all down to changing how we think about things.

He usually ends up changing the subject to hockey or something.
posted by philip-random at 9:12 AM on March 4, 2020 [5 favorites]

individuals (many of them anyway) have already changed their thinking and their actions. Now we need to light a fire for collective change (corporate, political, overall infrastructural).

It's not either/or. Both of these are catastrophic ends.

But we have perhaps done enough of the either now. On to the or.
posted by philip-random at 9:16 AM on March 4, 2020 [3 favorites]

Fashion and the tire industries are the biggest culprits in micro/nano plastic pollution. Litter is a contributor, but it's 4th or 5th down the list. Tires and fabric residues make up the super-majority of the problem.

I'd really like to see much more attention on clothing and other fabrics. That's one area where consumer choice could make a huge difference. The fast fashion and permanent wear industries in particular have a lot to answer for.
posted by bonehead at 9:23 AM on March 4, 2020 [4 favorites]

Plastic pollution, including microplastics, is a big problem. The "you're ingesting a credit card per month" thing seems to not be a huge problem in itself, and the kind of vaguely scaremongering stuff in the article "we found a thousand different chemicals!", "linked to cancer", etc. is just irresponsible. If this was as dangerous as they say, we should be seeing an epidemic of plastics-triggered diseases, but we're not.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 9:29 AM on March 4, 2020 [4 favorites]

If this was as dangerous as they say, we should be seeing an epidemic of plastics-triggered diseases, but we're not.

what are the current figures on cancer? Is it just me getting to a certain age or are those numbers angling up? And when we crunch the numbers to do this figuring, let's not forget to figure in things like the overall decline in cigarette smoking, other known causes that we've done a good job of recognizing and taking on.

Because it seems to me that there an awful lot of people in and around my life struggling with various cancers.
posted by philip-random at 9:35 AM on March 4, 2020 [5 favorites]

While human research is scarce for obvious reasons (and controlled experiments are difficult in general because micro/nanoplastics have become so omnipresent), there is quite a bit of scholarship linking microplastic ingestion to inflammation and disruption of the gut microbiome (review article), among other things, in various marine animals.

It would certainly be irresponsible to draw a direct line between rising microplastic levels and the various growing human health issues that are also credibly linked to inflammation and disruption of the gut microbiome. But it would seem at least as irresponsible to claim that no such line can be drawn.

The soberest reviews seem to come down solidly in the "no firm conclusions can be drawn due to insufficient data" camp (e.g. this report from the Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food and Environment, which reaches that conclusion for both human and environmental impacts).

So it seems like this comes down to the ol' "what if you're wrong and we create a better world for nothing" situation.
posted by Not A Thing at 10:13 AM on March 4, 2020 [10 favorites]

Nanoplastic should be better understood

Right now, the world is losing ecological productivity ("ecosystem function") at a great rate. Every ecosystem is under pressure and dealing with major burdens. Climate change is one, but so are persistent organic pollutants (POPs), toxic industrial chemicals (TICs). Plastic fragments are maybe another.

No one really knows what effects nanoplastics do have. Research is mixed. But we're already in a precarious situation ecologically, and these things have turned out to be persistent and ubiquitous. Everything else we've found to be similarly omnipresent and lasting in the environments and ecosystems has been an increased burden. It seems only prudent to be concerned about them.
posted by bonehead at 10:18 AM on March 4, 2020 [3 favorites]

The technology's probably already there, and most of the know-how. It's all down to changing how we think about things.

It seems you are not alone in this belief. Tell your cousin to Google "enhanced landfill mining" next time you get a chance.
posted by howfar at 10:26 AM on March 4, 2020 [1 favorite]

so this recent season of Doctor Who had an episode where an alien bacteria that feeds on plastic got to the Earth and basically was latching onto microplastics in people and eventually turning them into plastic scales that disintegrate. It was gruesome. I actually didn't want to believe it was true.

And now I'm going to have nightmares about this.
posted by numaner at 1:58 PM on March 4, 2020 [1 favorite]

This is one of the areas where we can really do a lot as individuals. I live with two environmentally conscious 21-year-olds, and we have reduced our plastic waste by something like 80% in the past two years. It's not me, it's them. I mean, I do it, but it is mainly because they keep control.
We are lucky to live in a country where most drinks come in recyclable containers with a deposit, but it was always that way, back to when soda came in glass bottles. Still, we now mainly drink tap water.
The real difference came when our municipality introduced very detailed recycling, with free organic waste bags for the organic waste. It made us think a lot more about plastics and now we almost always bring a fiber-based shopping bag when we go to the store and reusable containers for our leftovers and lunches. Before, I'd buy plastic bags and plastic film for food storage and lunch packages at least once a month. Now I can't even remember when I last stocked up. The worst culprit is the supermarket packaging. Yesterday I bought an organic cabbage from my local organic supermarket and it was in a plastic bag with a sticker on it that made it unsuitable for recycling. It's a dilemma: would it have been better to buy the cabbage from the Indian grocer where it is not organic and from an unknown source but also not in a bag?
Recently, a tax of about 10 cents was introduced on plastic shopping bags, and it does make a difference, because it makes the retailers ask you if you really want to pay for it. And of course you can afford a bag, but just the pause makes you think.
You can buy the green waste bags, and before the municipal plan, I'd take vegetable waste to the compost bins at our local cemetery. But I'll admit that I wouldn't have done it without two Gretas looking over my shoulder.

I guess what I'm saying is that young people are amazing and also that individual action is good, but you need political action for real impact.
posted by mumimor at 3:20 PM on March 4, 2020 [2 favorites]

As plastics break down over time, they can also absorb toxins from the environment, including PCBs.

Ah, it's that kind of article.

Are you implying Polychlorinated Biphenyls aren't toxic? Because we've been studying PCBs for decades and they really are toxic. Do not confuse this kind of language for the "Chemicals are bad" woo you also see online.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 5:10 PM on March 4, 2020 [2 favorites]

No sentence that begins, "But under President Trump" can end well. Back, now, to finish reading TFA.
posted by bryon at 10:16 PM on March 4, 2020

Every human on earth ingests a credit card’s worth of plastic each week

Save the planet - - switch to eating cash!
posted by fairmettle at 1:29 AM on March 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

The "current figures on cancer" in the US went up steadily for a few decades, and are now flat and/or decreasing since about 1995 or so. BUT. That increase over a long time wasn't a case of more people getting cancer, it was a case of better detection and diagnosis.

It's similar to how "autism rates are skyrocketing", which you'll hear from antivaxxers a lot. Yes, they've gone up pretty steadily over the last few decades, but it's not because of vaccines or 5G radiation or any stupid crap like that, it's because we've gotten better at diagnosing, and also probably because there's less stigma around it now.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 10:24 AM on March 7, 2020

does that decrease factor in fewer people smoking? Not to mention other cancers that we're now better at avoiding due to known environmental factors (unleaded gasoline etc).
posted by philip-random at 10:40 AM on March 7, 2020

philip-random: my view of an increasingly possible future -- that we'll eventually be mining landfills for all the "riches" we've been burying there over the years

I'd like to buy a landfill for my kids, but I'm worried about taking on other people's environmental liabilities. What should I do? Not actually kidding, because I agree that we're going to be mining these for centuries. What's going to happen after that is any one's guess, but it looks like the oil industry's goal is to burn up all the easily accessible petroleum ASAP, so once that's gone I guess we'll be using corn as chemical feedstock.
posted by sneebler at 12:02 PM on March 8, 2020