East Palestine’s Urgent Message for Plastic Policy
Reading Time: 5 minutesWhat the Train in East Palestine Never Should Have Been Transporting, What the East Palestine train derailment means for plastic policy.
In early February, when the Norfolk Southern train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, it set off an alarming chain of events: Hazardous chemicals spilled from the train cars and ignited a massive fire. Residents were told to evacuate. Thousands of fish in nearby streams died. The incident quickly became a political battleground.
But what hasn’t happened yet is a larger reckoning around why the derailment was so devastating in the first place. The train was carrying hazardous materials in large part because of our insatiable demand for plastics. Nearly half of the 38 cars that derailed were carrying plastics or chemicals used to make plastics.
The Ohio River Valley has a long history of petrochemical production, and Appalachia is crisscrossed by pipelines and dotted with fracking wells. Just a few miles from East Palestine, the Shell Pennsylvania Petrochemicals Complex sits on the bank of the Ohio River, around the bend from Conway, Pennsylvania—the derailed Norfolk Southern train’s final destination. The Shell plant is designed to produce more than 1.5 million tons of plastic each year, using chemicals from the fracking industry. The abundance of resources has led to calls to create a petrochemicals hub in the region, a proposal that has been met with concern given the potential impacts to public health and the environment.
When we think of the environmental impacts of plastic, we typically resort to the more visual examples of pollution, especially marine plastic pollution: sea turtles caught in discarded waste or floating mounds of debris. While marine plastic pollution is a crisis (and a rapidly growing one), even these startling images belie the magnitude of the problem. Plastic pollution is in the air we breathe and the food we eat.
The East Palestine crisis demonstrates that the problem with plastic is not just pollution, marine or otherwise. Effective policy needs to address negative impacts throughout the entire life cycle of production, use, and disposal. Conventional plastics are made from petrochemicals that need to be extracted through processes like fracking or oil drilling. These chemicals then must be transported, manufactured, and shipped. Once it’s made its way into a product, plastic often degrades into harmful and pervasive microplastics. (Car tires are a classic example.) Exposure to the chemicals in plastics can also be harmful to human health. And then, unless disposed of properly, plastic becomes pollution; since plastics are designed to be durable, so too are their social and environmental consequences.
So, a piece of ocean plastic is only a chapter in a long series of negative environmental impacts: The same plastic may have been made from fracked natural gas, transported by a pipeline, manufactured, and shipped by train, all before reaching the hand of a consumer. Far too often, we put the responsibility of plastic waste on the consumer—and while it’s of course good for consumers to try to reduce plastic use, their influence in this chain of decisions is ultimately limited. The plastics problem is a global problem, and as such, we need a coordinated global effort to address it.
Current attempts to take on the plastics problem—like the U.N.-backed New Plastics Economy Global Commitment, signed by Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Walmart, and Unilever, to name a few—are often quite significant. But even our most ambitious efforts are not enough. At the current rate of growth, plastic production could double in 20 years, and our ability to manage this waste can’t keep up.
The United Nations is currently negotiating a plastics treaty, which the executive director of the U.N. Environment Program has called the most important international environmental deal since the Paris Agreement. In the early stages of development, the aim is for the U.N. treaty to be ready by 2024. Two things are crucial for the treaty to be effective: First, it needs to be legally binding to ensure a globally coordinated effort. Second, it needs to address the entire plastics life cycle, starting with plastic production.
The waste hierarchy adage ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ is a useful blueprint for prioritizing policy: Governments and companies first need to reduce the amount of new plastic produced at the beginning of the life cycle. Eliminating problematic and unnecessary plastics, such as single-use flexible packaging, and significantly reducing the plastic that we cannot completely eliminate, is one crucial step. Film wrappings around products like magazines are the type of plastics we should (and could!) eliminate quickly. Capping or limiting the production of new, virgin plastic is another important solution. Placing a cap on the production of ozone-depleting substances, for example, was key to the success of the Montreal Protocol, the landmark legislation that helped start the recovery of the ozone layer.
Plastic is too useful to be abandoned entirely, which means we also need to ensure that products are designed to be easily, efficiently, and safely reused or recycled. Phasing out the use of hazardous additives and substances is imperative for the safe use, reuse, and recycling of plastics. Even still, recycling alone is not a perfect solution. Recycling itself has impacts, such as the cost and energy required to transport plastic and run the recycling plants. For most plastics, with current recycling technology, the quality degrades as the plastic is recycled, meaning that plastics can only be recycled a finite number of times. Complex plastics that consist of multiple types of plastic polymers and ineffective plastic sorting only make these problems worse. Many wealthy countries, meanwhile, currently ship their waste to less wealthy countries that do not have the infrastructure to properly manage this waste, leading to even greater rates of plastic pollution.
Instead, we need to ensure that the waste management burden is placed on the responsible parties. Policies that force plastic producers to be responsible for their waste can incentivize creating plastic systems that have fewer negative impacts. Better plastic labeling and sorting, along with designing and using simpler, easy-to-recycle materials, could improve recycling rates. For these policies to be effective, they need to be standardized globally, since plastic is traded internationally.
As part of the U.N. treaty negotiations, countries have proposed different approaches. In its proposal, the United States emphasizes reuse and recycling of plastic, but there is relatively little mention of reducing plastic production. The focus of the U.S. proposal is on limiting the amount of plastic pollution—downstream efforts—not on limiting the amount of plastic upstream. This contrasts with other proposals, such as the one put forth by the aptly named High Ambition Coalition, a group of more than 40 members, including the EU. Recognizing that plastic production is projected to double in the next 20 years, the first obligation proposed by the coalition is to set a target for the reduction of plastic production.
Downstream actions are important—there is no way plastic pollution is going away without being cleaned up. Eliminating all plastic isn’t feasible either, so reusing and recycling are important tools for plastic management. Plus, when utilized sufficiently, recycling and reuse can also put a dent in plastic production. But these tools alone are simply not enough to stop the plastic pollution problem, because there’s just too much plastic being made in the first place.
Thinking instead about the plastics life cycle as a system can help us mitigate more of its negative impacts. Upstream interventions that reduce the amount of plastic produced and consumed reduce not only pollution, but also all the other impacts that occur throughout the plastic life cycle. And less production means less plastic, and fewer petrochemicals, transported by train.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2023/03/east-palestine-plastics-policy-united-nations.html
Ref: slate
MediaDownloader.net -> Free Online Video Downloader, Download Any Video From YouTube, VK, Vimeo, Twitter, Twitch, Tumblr, Tiktok, Telegram, TED, Streamable, Soundcloud, Snapchat, Share, Rumble, Reddit, PuhuTV, Pinterest, Periscope, Ok.ru, MxTakatak, Mixcloud, Mashable, LinkedIn, Likee, Kwai, Izlesene, Instagram, Imgur, IMDB, Ifunny, Gaana, Flickr, Febspot, Facebook, ESPN, Douyin, Dailymotion, Buzzfeed, BluTV, Blogger, Bitchute, Bilibili, Bandcamp, Akıllı, 9GAG