Plastic Trash is Winning

I try to keep up at least a little with what's happening with dealing with plastic trash, a critical worldwide problem and a big one here in Indonesia.

I was just sent an article in the NYTimes: Reducing Plastic Pollution in Our Oceans Is Simpler Than You Think (thanks Carol Williams) about a serious effort to collect plastic trash in rivers before it goes into the oceans and to clean it up in the oceans too. But it points out that the use of plastic is fundamental to global society and the use of it is growing with no reduction in site.

It's heartening  to see many programs to deal with plastic trash. I hear talks and meet people dealing with it here. My wife Katrinka just arranged for Gede Robi to speak to the Sanur Rotary. He's the founder of, Navicula, a popular Indonesian grunge band. He works on reducing use of plastic around Indonesia. He's the subject of a film on Netflix, Pulau Plastic. He's well informed. He talks about problems with our solutions, says that using plastic as fuel is just more low grade fossil fuel. The 2012 documentary Trashed, narrated by Jeremy Irons, points out serious problems with even sophisticated trash to fuel systems as the burned plastic produces dioxins, a bad pollutant. 

And here's an article on how plastic recycling puts a significant amount of micro-plastic into the air and water. https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2023/05/22/plastic-recycling-microplastic-pollution/. Environmentalists are discouraged that after decades of efforts at recycling, that such a small percentage of plastic is being recycled. It might be better not to recycle unless how not to produce micro-plastic in the process is figured out. 

Maybe best build mountains with it and work on what to do with them that doesn't make things worse. 

The struggle worldwide to deal with plastic waste seems so far to me to be like humanities noble efforts to deal with climate change - not enough to hold it back. We celebrate every positive bit of news but there's rain on our parade when we zoom out to look at the big picture. Maybe only AI would be capable of seeing the vast and complicated big picture of all our environmental problems and coming up with a plan that works. 

Meanwhile we'll keep up our feeble efforts at trying to reduce our use of plastic. 

Good luck to us all.