McKibben, Environmentalists Suggest How to Defeat Plastic Waste
Gordon Dossett | October 2, 2023 | Bennington Banner
If you trot over to the transfer station and regularly toss your plastics into the recyclable dumpster, you may be alarmed to know how little of that material ends up in a landfill anyway.
According to a joint study done in May of 2022 by Beyond Plastics –a Bennington College environmental group, and The Last Beach Cleanup – a California-based nonprofit, 94-95 percent of plastics are not recycled.
Environmental writer Bill McKibben, Beyond Plastics founder Judith Enck, and writer Eve O. Schaub delivered other unpleasant truths in a roundtable discussion at the Southern Vermont Arts Center on Sunday. Despite the dire prognosis for the environment, the discussion – moderated with aplomb by Joe Donahue of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio – delivered the news with energizing good humor.
The genesis for the talk came from Schaub, who took a year off to go without producing any trash (during COVID, of all times). She chronicled her experience in a recently-published book, “Year of No Garbage” (available now at Northshire Bookstore, a sponsor of the event).
Schaub painted a zany, yet troubling, picture of her kitchen stacking up with all sorts of items as she attempted to clean and reuse plastic wrap and throw nothing away for a year. Items piled up despite her search for sustainable packaging. She’s gained a greater appreciation of her grandmother’s reliance on waxed paper and glass bottles. She thinks there are enough clothes in the world (and many new clothes contain at least some plastic), so she buys only used clothes.
In her year-long quest, she said, “I got a lot of misinformation. I got a lot of disinformation. I made this my full-time job. I was persistent, yet I couldn’t get to the bottom of these things." For example, trying to find out whether Saran Wrap was recyclable took days. The answer finally is: “It’s all plastic – it’s not getting recycled – unfortunately.”
To educate herself on the environment and effects of plastics, Schaub enrolled in Enck’s online Bennington College class, “Beyond Plastic Pollution.”
“I wanted the truth, and I got the truth,” Schaub said. “ And it was so much worse than I ever suspected.”
However, she added, “We can’t go on living with the greenwashing lies we’re being fed all the time. When we take all these plastics and put them in the recycling, they are ending up on a playground in Myanmar.”
Enck affirmed the simple mission of Beyond Plastic, which is “to end plastic pollution everywhere.”
Enck cited a study published by the World Economic Forum estimating that in 2030, for every three pounds of fish in the ocean, there will be one pound of plastic; by 2050, the ratio will be one for one.
“What I worry about is that the plastics industry is on to us. They know that people really care about this issue, so they are going to state legislatures and trying to pass really ineffective packaging bills," she said. Further, the industry is “pushing something called ‘chemical recycling,’ which is basically high heat or chemicals to deal with plastics … It makes the status quo worse.”
The chemical and plastics industry is still committed to increasing the production of plastic.
