Climate Crisis: See which small attitude can help reduce impact

Melissa Valliant carries in her backpack a set of reusable cutlery whenever she goes out to dinner, prepared to refuse disposable utensils that, she said, are part of the crisis of plastic pollution intrinsically linked to the climate crisis.

Plastic is made of chemicals derived from fossil fuels, whose burning drives the climate crisis by producing greenhouse gas emissions such as carbon dioxide and methane. Disposable cutlery in particular are typically produced with rigid plastic called polystyrene, made from a byproduct of oil.

“Plastic is contributing to climate change at all stages of its life cycle,” says Valliant, director of communications at Beyond Plastics, a national project that works to end plastic pollution and is based at Bennington College in Vermont.

“Plastic production, specifically, is heating the planet four times faster than air travel,” Vallian said. “In addition to its climate impact, it is also contributing to air and water pollution during the drilling and fracking process and toxic emissions coming out of the plastic production factory.”

In addition, the life cycle of plastics contributes to environmental injustice, as plastics tend to be manufactured and discarded in low -income communities and color communities, according to Valliant. The resulting pollutants led to a higher cancer rate in these areas.

Gross oil processing also requires a significant amount of energy, according to Jillian Goldfarb, an associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Cornell University in New York, by email. “A typical refinery will use about 1.5 barrel of water for each oil barrel it sues,” says Goldfarb, a member of the American Society of Chemistry.

The impact of choosing reusable cutlery

Some reports estimate that potentially between 36 billion and 40 billion plastic cutlery are used every year only in the United States, representing more than 100 million a day, according to Valliant.

You may think that recycling plastic cutlery can compensate for the damage of its use. But by 2018, only 9% of all the plastic the world has already produced – about 9 billion metric tons or almost 10 billion American tons – had been recycled, according to one report of the United Nations Program for the Environment.

This means that most of the rest ends in landfills, and the intentional durability of plastics means “the fork you used for lunch today can take up space in a landfill for the next 500 years,” says Goldfarb.

“In landfills, plastic utensils are weakened by mechanical forces, such as friction caused by movement and compression between literally tons of waste, as well as biological and chemical means, such as bacteria present in corrosive landfills and chemicals,” says Goldfarb. “Although this does little to degrade utensils over a significant period of time, it leads to the release of more microplastics, which can travel with the slurry and eventually contaminate the groundwater.”

What is not recycled or thrown away is burned or thrown in the trash, according to experts. The burning of plastic utensils releases carbon dioxide in the environment, says Goldfarb, and an incinerator that is not in its maximum performance can release particles and carbon monoxide.

However, emissions from these pollutants from burning are usually low when compared to landfills, according to reports from the US Environmental Protection Agency. The agency monitors atmospheric emissions and has standards for pollutants, according to Goldfarb.

The process of plastics production has a significantly worse impact on the environment than the use of individuals, which is “just one more reason why waste management solutions for unique and plastic plastic in general will not significantly contain this crisis,” says Valliant. “In fact, we need to interrupt pollution at source, which means reducing the production and use of plastic from the beginning.”

To limit the use of plastic cutlery, you can change to composible, bamboo or metal options, which usually require or significantly produce less energy, water, waste or emissions, according to Goldfarb. Producing half a kilo of bamboo forks, for example, consumes 0.46 kilowatts per hour, while doing half a kilo of plastic forks consumes 11 kilowatts per hour, according to Goldfarb. (The manufacture of metal utensils, however, requires more water than plastic utensils.)

But you don’t have to buy a reusable set from a fashion environmental store – you can simply use what you already have, says Valliant. And if a plastic fork weighs about 5 grams, our landfills would be spared approximately 200,000 tons of disposable plastic utensils, “a weight equivalent to 889 statues of freedom,” adds Valliant.

To put in perspective the economy in the use of electricity, Goldfarb explains that changing from plastic for metal forks “could save enough energy to charge your iPhone once a day for five years.”

“In the sea of ​​plastic waste we have created each year, a person changing to reusable cutlery will probably not change the global environmental impacts of plastic utensils on a climate mitigation scale,” says Goldfarb. “However, this action – if shared and discussed with others – can form the basis for a change community.

“Throughout the country, states and municipalities are banning disposable plastics (including utensils) in increasing numbers,” adds Goldfarb. “These collective actions can have very significant impacts.”

In addition, by reducing your portion of plastic waste and impact on pollution and climate crisis, you would also be diminishing the chances of residing microplastics in your body, experts – a phenomenon increasingly detected by recent research. Studies found microplastics in human blood, lungs, placentas, brains and testicles.

“This is really worrying because many of these chemicals are associated with cancer, hormonal disorders, diabetes, fertility problems – the more we learn, the scarier it gets,” says Valliant. “We should reduce our exposure to this, so it’s so important that policy training forces companies to do this.”

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This content was originally published in climate crisis: see which small attitude can help reduce impact on CNN Brazil.

Source: CNN Brasil