We all know plastics aren’t biodegradable and that’s bad, so why can’t we just use chemical science to break them down ourselves?
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We can turn just about anything into just about anything else, given enough time and energy. The problem is that those things cost a lot of money.
Pretty much all of our environmental problems are not caused by a lack of good alternatives, they are happening because all of the other options are more expensive. Whenever you can push the costs off onto “someone else,” there is no incentive to do things like make sure the waste from the products you produce or consume doesn’t stick around in the environment doing damage for thousands of years.
This is why you absolutely _need_ good regulations. If you don’t have them, then anyone who makes or sells anything will find a way to do it such that they get the maximum possible profit, and everyone else bears the maximum costs. To give a simple example, if you have some gold on your property, the cheapest way to extract it is to grind up the gold ore, mix it with water and cyanide, and then filter out the liquid and sprinkle zinc dust on it to make the gold precipitate out. What do you do with all the leftover cyanide? Well, you don’t want to dump it on your own property, so the cheapest thing to do is dump it on your neighbor’s property, or in the closest river. Obviously that’s bad for everyone else, but if you have no conscience and nobody stops you from doing it, it’s the most economical way. Of course, that’s only true because you are ignoring the _externalized cost_ – the cost someone else pays (your neighbor, or whoever else needs that river water, or future generations).
This is the problem for all environmental issues – people who make money off of some product or service find ways to push as many costs as possible onto other people. The less organized and weaker those people are, the better this works. If the local oil refinery dumps chemicals onto the ground in a poor neighborhood, how hard is it going to be for the people living there to stop them, or to be compensated for the damage? If the people show up and start dumping their trash on the oil refinery’s property, how likely are they to get away with it? Those power imbalances create situations where it becomes extremely easy for companies to externalize costs and spread them out to everyone else, while making billions for themselves.
CO2 in the atmosphere is another great example. The oil industry makes hundreds of billion of dollars per year in profits, but they can only do that because the hundreds of _trillions_ of dollars that dealing with the effects of climate change will cost are going to be paid by everyone else. If they had to pay that cost to produce gasoline or coal (for example), they’d never do it.
With plastics, we don’t really know the long-term externalized costs. We know that the plastic doesn’t ever disappear, it just breaks down into smaller and smaller particles. We know those particles are everywhere now – in you, in unborn babies, in all the food we eat, in our water, even in the air. We have no idea what kind of harm that is going to cause, or how to deal with it.
The plastics industry became very wealthy selling these products, and we enjoyed using them, and it all seemed like a great idea because _someone else_ is going to pay the true costs.
We could replace just about all of these plastics with biodegradable ones. It might cost twice as much, so now that $1 toy you bought at the dollar store would cost $2. Would it be worth it? I think it would be. But if you put a regular person in the store and show them two of the same item, one costs $1 and one costs $2, most people will go for the cheaper one. Maybe if you educate them and teach them how bad those non-biodegradable plastics are, some people would go for the more expensive option, but in general the cheaper one wins.
An easy way to fix it is to tax single-use and non-biodegradable plastics. Make them cost as much or more than the biodegradable options, and suddenly those externalized costs are put back on the producer and the consumer, and they’ll make the environmentally responsible choice out of their own self-interest.
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