It is time to find truth and balance in the myriad calls for plastics to be replaced with alternatives or degradable versions. If we don’t, we risk setting policies, formulating regulations, enacting legislation and investing in technologies that will do more harm than good.
This is the view of South African National Bottled Water Association Executive Director, Charlotte Metcalf, in response to the wave of anti-plastic sentiment rippling around the globe. Most of South Africa’s bottled waters are bottled in PET bottles.
Metcalf doesn’t dispute the fact that plastic in all its forms is one of the major pollutants of our water bodies and landmasses. Nor does she argue against the fact that ways must be found to curtail that pollution.
But, she does maintain that outright bans, or the adoption of unproven and untested alternatives, are grossly overrated as solutions to plastic pollution. Worse, she said, is that these are often knee-jerk reactions to the comments made by those who should know better, who should take responsibility for educating and informing the world’s citizens – the media, opinionmakers, thought leaders.
As an example, she pointed to a campaign launched recently by the South African arm of a well-respected international non-governmental organisation working in the field of the wilderness preservation and the reduction of human impact on the environment. The campaign’s cornerstone is that only 16% of plastics in South Africa are recycled. But, for 2017, Plastics|SA reported that 43.7% of all plastic in South Africa is recycled, while PETCO’s post-consumer recycling rate for PET was 65%.
“That’s math that just doesn’t add up,” she said. “Adding insult to injury is that, when asked, the NGO refused to disclose the source of that 16%. Plastics|SA and PETCO’s figures are, however, audited and available for scrutiny.”
The campaign also ranks water bottles in 4th position on its Top 10 list of South Africa’s plastics offenders. However, according to BMi Research, the non-alcoholic beverage market excluding dairy amounted to 5 754.1-million litres while the bottled water market accounted for just 543.7-million litres.
“How an industry that bottles less water in a year than the City of Cape Town used a day at the height of the Day Zero campaign manages to make the Top 10 Plastic Offenders list but that which packages 5 668,7-billion litres of fizzy drinks, iced teas and energy drinks doesn’t is beyond my comprehension,” said Metcalf.
Leaving the issue of misquoted statistics aside, how do the alternatives stack up? Let’s consider three: biodegradable plastics like oxo-biodegradable plastics, shop floor or counter-top water filling stations, and outright bans on plastic.
• Oxo-biodegradable plastics
Simply stated, oxo-biodegradable plastics are conventional polyolefin plastics to which small amounts of metal salts have been added to mimic biodegradation. In truth, however, these additives only facilitate a fragmentation of the materials, which do not fully degrade but break down into very small fragments that remain in the environment, and are available for the potential for ingestion by animals.
• Shop floor or counter-top water filling stations
In recent years, a number of packaged drinking water ‘innovations’ have been launched in South Africa including the bench-top filtering systems used in the hospitality industry (‘Grolsch’ bottle), and companies that refill containers with either filtered, treated or non-treated waters (such as water that has been through reverse osmosis and ozonated water), often inside retail outlets.
However, they cannot substantiate their claims of providing good quality water, beating the drought (an important consideration in South Africa today), and beating plastic. Research from the United Kingdom has proven that drinking from a refillable water bottle can be ‘many times worse than licking your dog’s bowl‘ in terms of the amount of bacteria it will bring you into contact with. Additionally, most of these systems source their water from the municipal supply and therefore afford no drought relief; plus their cleaning and sterilisation cycles are water-expensive.
• Ban plastic, let’s substitute with glass or tin
Switching to glass or tin bottles, jars, lunchboxes etc etc is not a sustainable or safe solution to decreasing the industry’s reliance on PET. Trucost, an American organisation helping companies and investors to achieve success by understanding environmental issues in business terms, estimates that substituting plastic in consumer products and packaging with alternatives that perform the same function would increase environmental costs from $139 billion to a total of $533 billion.
In most cases, the environmental cost per kilogram of alternative material is less than that of plastic. However, on average over four times more alternative material is needed (by weight) to perform the same function. Extrapolating to the entire consumer goods sector, over 342 Mt of alternative material would be needed to replace the 84Mt of plastic used in consumer products and packaging in 2015.This has major implications for costs and environmental impacts associated with manufacturing (such as raw material, energy and water use) as well as distribution.
“It really is time to find truth and balance in the myriad calls for plastics to be replaced with alternatives or degradable versions,” Metcalf said. “In July this year, Plastics|SA released plastics recycling figures for 2017 showing that, for the seventh year running, plastics recycling in South Africa had continued to grow, with more than 334 727 tons recycled back into raw material. This gives South Africa an input recycling rate of 43.7% – well above that of Europe’s recycling rate that currently sits at 31.1%.
“Importantly, too, recycling is helping create jobs – even if most are informal. Plastica|SA says that plastics recycling sustained 5837 formal jobs in 2017 in the recycling factories. PETCO estimates that 85% of its bottles collected for recycling comes from the informal sector and that PET recycling creates 64 000 income-generating opportunities.
“So, I ask again, what do you want to do? Switch to glass to reduce the amount of plastic used in South Africa but watch energy, carbon and water footprints increase? Or use your plastic responsibly, recycle and help retain 60 000+ jobs?
“The volume of waste – so much of it plastic – that lines our beaches distresses me. But knee-jerk reactions like complete bans, are not the answer. A holistic strategy that results in investing in solutions that encourage behaviour change coupled with the implementation of considered, well-thought through new technologies is much closer to the answer than outright bans,” Metcalf said.
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Sources:
Plastics|SA
PETCO
BMi Research
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/11/warning-over-refillable-water-bottles-is-yours-harbouring-danger/
https://www.getaway.co.za/travel-news/countries-that-have-banned-plastic/
Additional substantiation to the points above:
• Oxo-biodegradable plastics
Simply stated, oxo-biodegradable plastics are conventional polyolefin plastics to which small amounts of metal salts have been added to mimic biodegradation. In truth, however, these additives only facilitate a fragmentation of the materials, which do not fully degrade but break down into very small fragments that remain in the environment, and are available for the potential for ingestion by animals.
Furthermore, they create more problems for the recycling industry, which has spent the past decade building confidence in the technical integrity of recycled material and demonstrating its ability to perform as a viable alternative to virgin plastics. This is because separation facilities cannot distinguish between the various packaging films and oxo-biodegradable and standard plastic bags. They all look the same on a conveyor belt.
As a result, the possibility that a proportion of recycled plastic will contain oxo-biodegradable material exists. This could result in changing the characteristics of the material and may lead to a failure of products as degradation occurs, resulting in the hindering of market acceptance which will lead to reduced value of recycled material in South Africa.
• Shop floor or counter-top water filling stations
In recent years, a number of packaged drinking water ‘innovations’ have been launched in South Africa including the bench-top filtering systems used in the hospitality industry, and companies that refill containers with either filtered, treated or non-treated waters (such as water that has been through reverse osmosis and ozonated water), often inside retail outlets.
Most claim to provide good quality water, beat the drought (an important consideration in South Africa today), and beat plastic.
Quality-wise, they get the water they use from a tap, that is, a municipal source. The quality of municipal water in South Africa is – generally speaking – high but it does vary daily. If you live in Johannesburg, for example, you can check for yourself the fecal contamination of the water in your taps. Rand Water updates its reports on its web site daily.
Furthermore, there’s no guarantee how often the operators change the filters they use; because these systems do not operate in a clean room environment, secondary contamination from air poorly sterilised containers and handling is a given; the removal of chlorine and microorganisms these systems claim to do means there’s no defense against the growth of bacteria and, if the system itself and the containers it is refilling are not properly cleaned and sterilised, they quickly become a breeding ground for bacteria.
In fact, research from the United Kingdom has proven that drinking from a refillable water bottle can be ‘many times worse than licking your dog’s bowl‘ in terms of the amount of bacteria it will bring you into contact with. According to the Telegraph, EmLab P&K tested 12 water bottles of four different types – screw-top, slide-top, squeeze-top, and straw-top. Each water bottle had been used by an athlete for a week without being washed. The bottles harboured gram-positive cocci, which can lead to skin infections, pneumonia, or blood poisoning. The conclusion was that drinking from these bottles can be worse than eating a meal from your pet’s dish.
When it comes to being a water-wise solution to the water crisis, they fail miserably not only because most of them get their water from the municipal supply and therefore afford no drought relief, their cleaning and sterilisation cycles are water-expensive.
Granted, the reusable ‘Grolsch’ bottle does prevent you from purchasing a PET bottle every time you want to drink water. But, bottles don’t litter, people do. If you recycle that bottle, you reduce its environmental footprint by 25%.
So, what’s better? Opting for the ‘Grolsch’ to reduce your plastic footprint but increasing your water footprint and upping the health risks, or purchasing a SANBWA member’s water and recycling the plastic safe in the knowledge that the water comes from a sustainable resource (not the tap), your water footprint is half that of the ‘Grolsch’ alternative and the health risks are much lower?
• Ban plastic, let’s substitute with glass or tin
Switching to glass or tin bottles, jars, lunchboxes etc etc is not a sustainable or safe solution to decreasing the industry’s reliance on PET. This is because glass is heavier to transport and has a substantial impact on the product’s carbon footprint. Glass also has handling and breakage negatives; it not ideal to travel with and when it is littered it causes a much more hazardous environment.
Trucost is an American organisation helping companies and investors to achieve success by understanding environmental issues in business terms. Its 2018 wanted to expand on this conducted by Franklin Associates (2013) and Denkstatt (2011), which modeled the substitution of plastic with
alternative materials (such as paper, steel, aluminum and glass) and suggest that a move away from plastics may come at an even higher net environmental cost.
Trucost’s key finding was that – in a business as usual scenario – the environmental cost of plastic in consumer goods is 3.8 times less than the alternatives materials that would be needed to replace plastic.
Although alternative materials such as glass, tin, aluminum and paper are viable alternatives to plastic in many consumer goods applications, they have higher environmental costs in the quantities needed to replace plastic.
Trucost estimates that substituting plastic in consumer products and packaging with alternatives that perform the same function would increase environmental costs from $139 billion to a total of $533 billion. In most cases the environmental cost per kilogram of alternative material is less than that of plastic. However, on average over four times more alternative material is needed (by weight) to perform the same function. For example, a typical plastic soft drink bottle contains 30grams of plastic. But if replaced by a weighted average mix of alternative materials currently used in the market, an equivalent capacity bottle would require 141 grams of alternative materials such as glass, tin or aluminum in the USA. Extrapolating to the entire consumer goods sector, over 342 Mt of alternative material would be needed to replace the 84Mt of plastic used in consumer products and packaging in 2015.
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