The Movement of Matter and the Problem of Plastics: Practicing Systems Thinking (part 2)

We live in a time of rapid change and uncertainty. The 50 year failure of the environmental movement has left us with a tangle of interconnected problems. Ecosystem destruction;  freakishly high levels of pollution of the land the water and the atmosphere; and resource depletion combine to create a looming crisis of epic proportions. We are faced with increasing political and economic instability and it’s clear that there will be no large scale co-ordinated efforts to address any of it.

 

This blog is about what we can do, as ordinary people in families and small groups, to create lives worth living; to build a future worth having; and to be a force for renewal and regeneration in our much depleted world. 

This is part 2 of an in-depth look at the elements that compose all whole systems. This series of post connects to and builds on the posts on managing our personal resources here and here. If you haven’t read part 1 you can find it here. Start reading from the beginning here. 

 

Each of the three types of resources Energy, Matter, Information has a distinctive pattern of movement within the system. Understanding the movement of matter is essential for understanding the twin predicaments that shape our lives and the lives of our children and grandchildren: pollution and resource depletion.

 

Matter is messy and hard to control. It moves in circular patterns. The thing you tossed over your shoulder yesterday is likely to turn up on your path (or your dinner plate) tomorrow.  

 

Matter is solid, visible and touchable, in a way that energy and information are not. You can pick it up and examine it. You can see the wear and tear or dirt and grime. You can wash and repair and reuse but at a certain point you have to decide whether it’s useful life is over. 

 

Good care and moderate use can keep material possessions functional for a long time but most things have an end point when they are no longer useful in their current form.

 

The circular movement of matter continues long after it’s thrown away.

 

In the last 50 years massive amounts of biological and geological resources have been extracted and turned into consumer goods. Waste is produced at every phase of the process: extraction, transportation to production facilities, processing, packaging, transporting to market or consumers. The packaging is thrown in the garbage immediately and the product it contained may follow in as little as 6 months.

 

Waste plastic collects in giant gyres in the ocean where it is slowly beaten into tiny fragments by the waves. Or it degrades on land into microscopic particles. In either case these micro-plastics are taken up by plants and animals. They contaminate the food web and bio-accumulate in the larger creatures, including our food crops and animals, and inevitably in our bodies.

 

The secondary economy, the economy of human production, has always relied on the capacity of the primary economy, the larger ecosystem, to accept and neutralize the waste products of human manufacturing. As long as human production remained small scale; widely distributed; and relied on natural materials; waste management was rarely a problem.

 

Natural materials from biological sources degrade relatively quickly and easily into the soil or the water and the biosphere has evolved over millions of years into a complex interactive system where any form of waste is a resource for another part of the system.

 

As large scale industrial processes began to take over the secondary economy in the early 20th C, using chemicals previously unknown, or uncommon, to process petrochemicals into synthetics materials, the costs of dumping waste products in to the environment began to rise. By the mid-century they started to come to public attention in the form of ecological disasters with devastating human health consequences.

 

Between 1962 and 1970 Dryden Chemicals Limited dumped more than 9 tonnes of mercury waste from their paper mill into the English-Wabigoon River in Northwestern Ontario. In 1974 Japanese researchers confirmed the devastating effects of mercury poisoning on the communities of Grassy Narrows* and Whitedog. “Minimata Disease” was named after the Japanese village where the neurological damage caused by mercury poisoning was first discovered in 1956!

 

The Love Cannel, a neighbourhood in upstate New York infamously built on land saturated with 19,800 metric tonnes of chemical waste from the dyes, perfumes, and solvents used in the production rubber and plastics by the Hooker Chemical Company between 1940 and the mid 1950’s clearly demonstrated the devastating and deadly effects of “Better Living Through Chemistry”**

 

Despite this and other tragedies, the clear connection between industrial toxins, cancer, genetic abnormalities, and autism, which should have led to dramatic changes, has been largely ignored. Fundraising for “cancer research” continues while cancer rates rise and the highly paid researchers blithely ignore the obvious. 

 

Plastic production has increased dramatically since Dupont coined it’s slogan and the main effect of the limited environmental regulation enacted in North America was that manufacturing and manufacturing jobs were exported to poor countries without environmental and safety regulations. (The social cost of throwing the working class here into abject poverty in an attempt to move the toxic mess over there is another story.***)

 

The environmental movement has also ignored the obvious. Over the last 50 years it has consistently let industry off the hook. The main focus of action has been on personal responsibility and consumer focused recycling programs. Essentially, trying to mop up the flood while steadfastly ignoring the running tap in the bathtub.

 

The problem of plastics has continued unabated and pollution levels have risen to the point of very nearly overwhelming the capacity of the environment to contain it.

 

Unfortunately, the feed stock for plastic production, ethylene, is a waste product; a by-product in the production of valuable fuels: diesel for industrial use; gasoline for cars and trucks; and jet fuel for air travel. 

 

Ethylene cannot be used as fuel and getting rid of it is a problem. In many areas there are regulations restricting the amount that can be flared off, that is, burning it and dumping it into the atmosphere.

 

New plastic is cheaper than recycled plastic because the raw material is virtually free. The recycled product simply can’t compete. Collecting, transporting, cleaning, sorting, and reprocessing existing plastic of many different types and colours costs more than producing perfectly clean new plastic pure enough to be considered “food grade” in any colour you want.

 

Meanwhile the circular movement of matter continues, as it does. 

 

The reckless extraction of raw materials has ravaged enormous areas of land. Mine tailings leaking into river ecosystems have contaminated drinking water and annihilated fish stocks. Our “recyclable” plastic waste is dumped offshore onto poor countries. Industrial waste from manufacturing goods for the North American market in China, India, and elsewhere, contaminates the atmosphere we all share and poisons the water used to grow crops we all eat.

 

Matter moves in circles. Carefully guiding the cycles and transformations makes it useful and keeps it useful for longer. Reusing, repurposing and recycling materials is ideal but there is a limit to how many times most things can be reused or recycled. 

 

Everything eventually degrades into the land, the water, or the air and the cycle continues.

 

*More than 50 years later the fish in the river are still unsafe to eat; the people of Grassy Narrows are still suffering the effects of the persistent toxicity; corporate liability laws are unchanged; and the government has still not stepped up to do what is needed to clean it up.

 

**The slogan used by Dupont Chemicals from 1935 to 1982

 

*** Arguably a very important one since our current political instability can be traced directly back to the widespread immiseration that resulted.