Plastic Soup

Some math …

November 8th, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized

You might get the impression that we in the Netherlands are dealing well with our waste. Relatively little waste ends up on the street (and thus eventually in the environment), and the waste we neatly discard in trash receptacles largely disappears into incinerators.

Good riddance to waste.

But is this really the case?

Even though political parties and environmental organizations feel very strongly about the emission of carbon and the disastrous effects green house gases have on our environment, I have never noticed them to criticize the production and the processing of synthetics.

Even though …

For the production of 1 kilo of plastic, 2 kilos of oil is needed.

Plainly put … of those two kilos, one kilo is used to make plastic out of the other kilo. This one kilo needed to generate the energy to produce the plastic yields 3 kilos of carbon dioxide.

Fortunately the other kilo is still contained in the plastic itself, and thus can be stored for a longer period by means of reuse and recycling.

However …

In the Netherlands, no less than 1.2 million tons of plastic waste are collected annually; 80% of which ends up being incinerated. As soon as you start burning plastic, carbon dioxide is released from the oil contained in the plastic.

Thus in the Netherlands, 80% of 1.2 million tons (equivalent to 960 million kilos) of oil is wasted annually. And two times (for the production and incineration) 2.88 billion (equivalent to 5.76 billion kilos) of carbon dioxide is released.

A number such as 5.76 billion is difficult to imagine, but it might be similar to the carbon emissions from a Hummer Automatic Luxury (the most polluting SUV with an emission of 412 g/km) being driven 14 billion kilometers—in other words about 350,000 Hummers circumnavigating the globe!

Every kilo of plastic that we recycle instead of burning, yields a reduction in emissions of 8.7 kilos of carbon dioxide. To recycle plastic, you need only 0.1 kilos of oil, instead of the two kilos needed to produce new plastic. Also, in so doing, you do not incinerate any plastic.

Merely a drop in the ocean?

Back to the math … globally, 60 million tons of plastic waste is produced annually. Only 6% of this is being recycled.

This means that annually, 94% of 60 million tons (equivalent to 56.4 billion kilos) of oil is being “thrown away”, and 338.4 billion kilos of carbon dioxide is being released.

Shouldn’t we assume some responsibility—as an example for others?

If you consider that the Netherlands is the largest carbon polluter per square kilometer in the entire world (with 4,294 tons CO2/km2—over seven times more than the United States and China, and almost fourteen times more than India), then it seems to me that we have something to atone for.

By the way, the next time you accept a convenient plastic bag at the store, remember that five of those bags already account for a carbon emission of 1 kilo …