24 Oct 2018 ‘Time to find truth and balance’ in myriad anti-plastic messages
It is time to find truth and balance in the myriad calls for plastics to be replaced with alternatives or degradable versions. If we don’t, we risk setting policies, formulating regulations, enacting legislation and investing in technologies that will do more harm than good, asserts SA National Bottled Water Association executive director, Charlotte Metcalf.
Her comments are in response to the wave of anti-plastic sentiment rippling around the globe.
Metcalf (left) doesn’t dispute the fact that plastic in all its forms is one of the major pollutants of our water bodies and landmasses, nor the fact that ways must be found to curtail that pollution.
But, she does maintain that outright bans, or the adoption of unproven and untested alternatives, are grossly overrated as solutions to plastic pollution.
Worse, she posits, is that these are often knee-jerk reactions to the comments made by those who should know better, who should take responsibility for educating and informing the world’s citizens – the media, opinionmakers, thought leaders.
As an example, she pointed to a campaign launched recently by the local arm the WWF whose cornerstone is that only 16% of plastics in SA are recycled.
But, for 2017, Plastics|SA reported that 43.7% of all plastic in South Africa is recycled, while PETCO’s post-consumer recycling rate for PET was 65%.
“That’s maths that just doesn’t add up,” she says. “Adding insult to injury is that, when asked, the NGO refused to disclose the source of that 16%. Plastics|SA and PETCO’s figures are, however, audited and available for scrutiny.”
The campaign also ranks water bottles in 4th position on its Top 10 list of South Africa’s plastics offenders. However, according to BMi Research, the non-alcoholic beverage market, excluding dairy, amounted to 5 754.1-million litres while the bottled water market accounted for just 543,7-million litres.
“How an industry that bottles less water in a year than the City of Cape Town used a day at the height of the Day Zero campaign make the ‘Top 10 Plastic Offenders’ list, but that which packages 5 668,7-billion litres of fizzy drinks, iced teas and energy drinks doesn’t is beyond my comprehension,” declares Metcalf.
Leaving the issue of misquoted statistics aside, how do the alternatives stack up? Let’s consider three, she suggests: biodegradable plastics like oxo-biodegradable plastics, shop floor or counter-top water filling stations, and outright bans on plastic.
- Oxo-biodegradable plastics
Simply stated, oxo-biodegradable plastics are conventional polyolefin plastics to which small amounts of metal salts have been added to mimic biodegradation.
In truth, however, these additives only facilitate a fragmentation of the materials, which do not fully degrade but break down into very small fragments that remain in the environment, and are available for the potential for ingestion by animals.
- Shop floor or counter-top water filling stations
In recent years, a number of packaged drinking water ‘innovations’ have been launched in South Africa including the bench-top filtering systems used in the hospitality industry (‘Grolsch’ bottle), and companies that refill containers with either filtered, treated or non-treated waters (such as water that has been through reverse osmosis and ozonated water), often inside retail outlets.
However, they cannot substantiate their claims of providing good quality water, beating the drought (an important consideration in SA today), and beating plastic.
Research from the United Kingdom has proven that drinking from a refillable water bottle can be ‘many times worse than licking your dog’s bowl’ in terms of the amount of bacteria it will bring you into contact with.
Additionally, most of these systems source their water from the municipal supply and therefore afford no drought relief; plus their cleaning and sterilisation cycles are water-expensive.
- Ban plastic, let’s substitute with glass or tin
Switching to glass or tin bottles, jars, lunchboxes etc is not a sustainable or safe solution to decreasing the industry’s reliance on PET.
Trucost, an American organisation helping companies and investors to achieve success by understanding environmental issues in business terms, estimates that substituting plastic in consumer products and packaging with alternatives that perform the same function would increase environmental costs from $139-billion to a total of $533-billion.
In most cases, the environmental cost per kilogram of alternative material is less than that of plastic. However, on average, over four times more alternative material is needed (by weight) to perform the same function.
Extrapolating to the entire consumer goods sector, over 342Mt of alternative material would be needed to replace the 84Mt of plastic used in consumer products and packaging in 2015.
This has major implications for costs and environmental impacts associated with manufacturing (such as raw material, energy and water use) as well as distribution.
“It really is time to find truth and balance in the myriad calls for plastics to be replaced with alternatives or degradable versions,” Metcalf professes.
“In July this year, Plastics|SA released plastics recycling figures for 2017 showing that, for the seventh year running, plastics recycling in SA had continued to grow, with more than 334 727 tons recycled back into raw material.
“This gives South Africa an input recycling rate of 43.7% – well above that of Europe’s recycling rate that currently sits at 31.1%.
“Importantly, too, recycling is helping create jobs – even if most are informal. Plastica|SA says that plastics recycling sustained 5837 formal jobs in 2017 in the recycling factories.
“PETCO estimates that 85% of its bottles collected for recycling comes from the informal sector and that PET recycling creates 64 000 income-generating opportunities.
“So, I ask again, what do you want to do? Switch to glass to reduce the amount of plastic used in South Africa but watch energy, carbon and water footprints increase? Or use your plastic responsibly, recycle and help retain 60 000+ jobs?
“The volume of waste – so much of it plastic – that lines our beaches distresses me. But knee-jerk reactions like complete bans, are not the answer.
“A holistic strategy that results in investing in solutions that encourage behaviour change coupled with the implementation of considered, well-thought through new technologies is much closer to the answer than outright bans,” Metcalf concludes.
Source: SANBWA