It’s raining plastic!

It’s in our oceans and streams, it’s in our air and water. Plastic is everywhere.

Plastic is everywhere because it’s a co-product of fossil fuel production. Plastic exists because we use oil and gas to power urban civilization, it’s a product that exists because of the other – the more fossil energy we produce the more plastic we produce. Fracking, which has lowered the price of gas and made a bumper crop of plastic. New plastics plants are going to mean even more plastic will be produced in the coming years.

Plastic is a wonderful and nasty substance at the same time. It’s cheap, it’s durable and is provides many functions with minimal material. Compared to glass or metal its remarkably lightweight, saving fuel in its transport and limiting space needed for its disposal. Plastic resists biodegradation but for the most part is combustible. Without heat and fire though, it’s long chains of carbon stay together, breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces in the environment.

Ask any country boy with burn barrel, and they’ll tell you plastic burns but some of it can sure be noxious and smells really bad. A hotter fire helps break the chains down to carbon dioxide and water but there are still often nasty chemicals like lead and cadmium used to color and soften the plastic. Chemicals that might be temporarily detained in a landfill but will eventually leach out into the water and the environment. The amounts of lead, cadmium and other metals might be low in any specific plastic but put together, over the years in a mass burn incinerator or landfill and they add up. All landfills ultimately leak to boot.

That said, chances are a discarded glass bottle or tin can is going to last a lot longer in the environment than a plastic bottle. The combustible nature of plastic does mean it can break down in the environment with fire – such as wildfire, a burn barrel or pit, a campfire. So less of it sticks around in the woods. Even the remaining toxic compounds are absorbed and broken down into the environment eventually. The same can’t be said about broken glass bottles or cans in the farm dump.

Plastics can be recycled or combusted for energy but more needs to be done to make them less toxic and more standardized for recycling. More needs to be done to encourage recycling and consideration of biodegradable alternatives when practical. But compared to the cans and glass they often replace, in many ways plastic is vastly superior.