I rewatched Addicted to Plastic the other day, and a few of the recyclers featured had a really interesting view on plastics and garbage dumps.
They had both developed technologies that would turn any kind of plastic into one type of usable material. And both of these guys talked quite matter-of-factly about mining plastic from garbage dumps in the future.
The first thing that struck me about this is the scary beauty of capitalism. When recycling plastics becomes sufficiently profitable, I expect it will be amazing how quickly things move, technology develops, and garbage starts disappearing. Literally, dumps will disappear. There will be no such thing as an unrecyclable plastic. Of this I am absolutely certain.
The other striking thing about this proposed cycle is the no guilt aspect. "Oh, it's ok if we have a disposable culture now, because we'll just go clean it up later when we run out of what we need to make it and we'll just make it again! No harm done."
I assume I don't have to point out who the losers are in this scenario.
But I digress. What these segments really did was make me curious about the feasibility of this, and whether or not it's already happening. And it appears it is! I've only done a quick search, but I've found a few articles about garbage mining, one about the likely prospect of dumps in the UK from the 80s being opened up and mined for their plastics sometime in the next 20 years or so, another from back in '93 about some towns that were already mining their dumps in Pennsylvania, and this one from San Francisco which also mentions that SF already diverts 70% of their waste to either recycling or composting. This seems like a huge number to me and makes me really curious about Vancouver.... so that is my next project. What exactly does Vancouver do with its waste? And where does the recycling go they collect in the Blue Boxes? And how am I going to find this out?
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Oprah had a show on the environment where she talked about the issues regarding plastic. She profiled this one american company that IS mining landfills now. (They started their company by reusing water bottles to bottle their fertilizer.) If I can find the link I'll share it with you!
ReplyDeleteHere it is - from Oprah's Earth Day Special last year:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch#!v=Jo9k4b0aoD8&feature=related
(The company is called Terracycle)
Thanks Urban Girl!
ReplyDeleteHey mrprose,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment. Yeah Fake Plastic Fish is an inspiration all right!! I'm always going to her site to check for plastic-free alternatives, although some of the product brands in the US aren't available in New Zealand. The amazing uses for baking soda she lists are awesome though!!
Oh - I hate when my "less than pale green" coworkers try to tell me to worry less because it can just be mined at the dump later if we need it... If we just use less (or better, none that's disposable), we won't HAVE to mine for more later. Makes me feel like such an ant amongst Aesop's grasshoppers!
ReplyDeleteI look forward to reading what you discover about Vancouver's practices! In my area it varies wildly by municipality and waste collection company (which changes ever few years with new contracts).