So many secrets - and the biggest one of all is that this never needed to happen in the first place. While plastic has a legitimate place in our lives, that place is just a fraction of what we have perpetrated. A very very big mess.In 2019, the waste recycler, SKM, kicked the recycle can down the road and into warehouses in Victoria after China stopped taking Australian recycle waste. That action and its subsequent fallout is pretty much the same as the way we have mortgaged our futures well beyond our capacity to pay - and will leave it to our children to clean up - probably under some very uncomfortable circumstances. In August 2019, SKM went into receivership, after illegally stockpiling six massive warehouses with waste they could not recycle. SKM had literally rented each warehouse, filled it with recycle rubbish in about 8 weeks and then locked the doors. That was their back up recycling plan.When SKM went into liquidation, they owed more than $60 million to creditors. With the warehouse contents now the responsibility of the unpaid landlord, there was a further cost and conscience issue with their clearing. One warehouse costs in excess of $1 million to clear and that is before the issue of where all the recycle waste goes. Nothing has been reported on the state of play since last August beyond the sale of the warehouses, but presumably warehouses were cleared and the contents sent to landfill because the defining quiet smells a little of a PR lid sealing off the problem from pesky public noses.
IF ALL THIS SOUNDS FAMILIAR, THERE IS A VERY GOOD REASON. THE SKM SCAM IS A MICROCOSM OF WHAT IS PLAYING OUT ON THE WORLD STAGE. THE WAREHOUSE SHEDS OF RUBBISH ARE OUR OCEANS, RIVERS, MOUNTAINS, RAIN, SALT, LANDFILLS AND OUR BODIES.
As governments and environmental groups seek to get plastic polluters to take responsibility for their own rubbish, it's easy to understand why they are fighting back like alley cats. When you are among the fattest cat businesses on earth, you tend to strongly resist your fat careless underbelly being exposed. (Yes, I know most alley cats aren't actually fat, but these ones are.) The fat cat facts are that big oil and big soda, with our help, have truly trashed the place and the consequences are strewn in front of us for as far as we can see. Rolling Stone says we are in a plastics pandemic and it's hard not to agree. But the problem is that we are plastic addicts. And addicts do what addicts do. Addiction."PLASTIC CONTAINS OUR HOT COFFEE AND FROZEN DINNERS. IT IS THE MATERIAL OF CHILDHOOD, FROM PAMPERS TO PLAYMOBIL TO PLAYSTATION 4. IT CLOAKS OUR E-COMMERCE PURCHASES AND IS WOVEN INTO OUR SNEAKERS, FAST FASHION, AND BUSINESS FLEECE. HUMANS ARE NOW USING A MILLION PLASTIC BOTTLES A MINUTE, AND 500 BILLION PLASTIC BAGS A YEAR — INCLUDING THOSE WE USE TO BAG UP OUR PLASTIC-LADEN TRASH."We have used twice as much plastic since 2002 as before and plastic has been sold to us as a recyclable product, but the truth is that it's rarely recycled. According to a 2017 study published in the journal Science Advances, since 1950, globally we have created 6.3 trillion kilograms of plastic waste and 91 percent has never been recycled. Not even once. Why have we been so tardy in the development of recycling plastics? When you think about it, it's kind of odd. The technology isn't that hard and yet here we are with these mind boggling statistics. Well, here's a clue: The very people - Government - who are asking plastics polluters to be responsible for their own waste, are the same people who sign off fossil fuel subsidies in the first place. Let that sink in.PLASTIC IS CHEAP - AND FOR VERY GOOD REASON. FOSSIL FUELS ARE SUBSIDIZED. “PLASTICS ARE JUST A WAY OF MAKING THINGS OUT OF FOSSIL FUELS,” SAYS JIM PUCKETT, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE BASEL ACTION NETWORK.Basel Action Network is devoted to enforcement of the Basel Convention, an international treaty that blocks the developed world from dumping hazardous wastes on the developing world, and was recently expanded, effective next year, to include plastics.Of course, the net result of our plastic obsession, despite the developed world's best attempts to foist the problem onto the developing world is that we now ingest around a credit card of microplastics every week.
In the end, we simply have to stop creating so much unnecessary plastic. Recycling will emerge from this fog of inertia because we are literally out of options and it simply isn't that hard. We've been sold a string of excuses and inaction for more than 20 years, but as we are increasingly aware that we are literally drowning in our own plastic, tolerance and unqualified belief is shifting. We simply aren't that stupid anymore.
Most people think that the circular economy is about making sure all materials are reused or recycled. Don't buy into that logic. It misses the point of materials that should never have been invented for that purpose in the first place. That includes about 80% of the plastic on earth.
You can get more information at RollingStone's story, How Big Oil and Big Soda kept a global environmental calamity a secret for decades.