Ban on plastic straws is a distraction

Ah, plastics! The once-wonder material that has turned a sizable portion of our precious planet into a trashy hellscape. It’s an issue that has got plenty of publicity, with Malaysia among many countries stepping up to try to turn the tide on the problem.

Our first major step was Selangor’s ban on plastic drinking straws last year. At first glance, this seems laudable. It tells us that the government is serious about the problem and wants to help solve it.

But does it?

A mind-blowing 8 million tonnes of plastics flow into the ocean every year. Guess how much of that comprises plastic straws?

0.025%.

Even if every single person in Malaysia stopped using plastic straws, 99.975% of the problem would still remain unsolved. So why all this fuss?

Because plastic straws are something we can easily do without. Sure, it’s an inconvenience; but not a major one. And there are easy replacements available: drinking straws made of metal and paper have since flooded the market.

Giving up plastic straws gives people a warm, fuzzy feeling of being good stewards of Mother Earth, without actually having to do much.

The ban is a distraction. It won’t fix the problem of plastics. Worse, we are lulled into thinking we’re actually doing something when the ban is close to being useless. It only makes sense as a small part of the solution or as a first step towards a more comprehensive ban on single-use plastic.

We can’t depend on slow-acting regulations to remedy our accelerating plastic problem.

Last week, we looked at the severity of the global plastic epidemic. Now let’s look at some promising tech solutions on the horizon. No silver bullets among them, but they do hold promise and when deployed systematically and in conjunction with other measures, can be a formidable force for effecting change.

The problem is multifaceted. On one hand, we already have an immense plastic pollution problem that needs to be dealt with. The United Nations says that plastic pollution is the second most ominous threat to the global environment, after climate change. The annual production of plastic in 1950 was 1.7 million metric tons. It was 322 million metric tons in 2015, up 189-fold in a mere 65 years. And the worrying trend is only set to continue.

On the other hand, we urgently need to develop plastics that are biodegradable. In the event that we can’t do this, we need to set up infrastructure for an end-of-life solution which doesn’t involve plastic ending up in gargantuan landfills or the ocean.

The Ocean Cleanup project is probably the most beloved and highly-publicised of the plastic removal solutions out there. This is arguably in large part due to its prodigious CEO Boyan Slat who founded it at the tender age of 19, when most boys would rather be playing video games or chatting up girls.

The concept is simple – build a huge, free-floating net that captures ocean plastic. Making it work is anything but simple. The seas are an unsparing and unforgiving environment, as the Ocean Cleanup team quickly found out. The net, designed to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the largest accumulation of plastic refuse in the world’s oceans, hit some road bumps along the way.

The first full-scale prototype deployed in September 2018 broke down and had to be removed and repaired. A second prototype, deployed in June 2019 in Hawaii ran into difficulties initially but these issues were quickly ironed out and it’s been deemed a success, capturing both plastic waste and the more sinister and easily-digestible microplastics.

But the project is not without its fair share of critics. Marine biologist Jan van Franeker of Wageningen Marine Research in the Netherlands says, “Cleaning up in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is, in my view, not a very clever way to address this problem. It’s such a waste of energy.”

She’s right. Going all the way out to the middle of the ocean to clean up plastic waste is akin to mopping the floor without turning off the tap – it’ll never get dry. Plastic waste needs to be caught as close to the source of the pollution as possible – and this would invariably mean the rivers, which supply the bulk of the plastic waste to the oceans.

This truth isn’t lost to the Ocean Cleanup team who have worked in near secrecy to develop and deploy the Interceptor – a futuristic-looking, solar-powered, barge-like structure that cleans up rivers. One of the first of these Interceptors has been deployed in our very own and incredibly polluted Klang River. So far, it’s been a success story, cleaning up 100,000kg of garbage from the river daily.

As good as this sounds, it’s only one part of the solution. What do we do with the waste that’s already been collected? Do we just dump them all in ever-larger landfills? The answer has to be a resounding no!

The hydra-like problem of plastic waste requires us to strategically deploy an entire array of solutions.

Step 1 is to have multiple recycling streams so that waste is divided into plastic, paper, metal and others as early in the waste stream as possible.

Step 2 is getting our waste through high-tech, AI-powered waste sorting facilities to separate them even further.

Step 3 is upcycling as much of the plastic as possible (upcycling is reusing a material without degrading the quality and composition of the material).

Step 4 is recycling the remaining high-value plastic that can’t be upcycled.

The 5th and final step is to turn the plastic that can’t be recycled into energy – by building state-of-the-art waste-to-energy plants. These plants will convert the remaining plastic into useful fuel.

Picking apart our proliferating problem of plastic waste will take all that we’ve got – it’s one of the most complex conundrums confounding us today. But if we follow the steps detailed above, there is a very good chance that we’ll emerge victorious. We owe it to ourselves and to our precious planet to make sure we do. - FMT