Plastics have been in the news a lot lately, with the relatively low oil prices and the boom in plastics manufacturing brought on fracking. 🛢️ A lot of the articles lately note that not only is plastic a non-renewable material, coming from the co-products of oil and gas production, it’s long chains of carbon atoms are often difficult to break down by bacteria and sunlight. Plastic is only easily broken down by heat and combustion, when the carbon molecules bond to oxygen to produce carbon dioxide and other byproducts.

In many ways, I would argue that plastic is environmentally superior to metals and glass for packaging. 🥫 Metal and glass does not break down in fire, there is no “natural” process to break it down in the environment, it must either be landfilled, buried, or brought back to industrial recycling. In many remote areas, metals and glass become litter that never leaves the land.  Glass in particular is notorious, as it can break, leaving dangerous materials that can cut people’s feet, damage tires and produce a long-term nuisance. Metal — especially cans made out of iron rust — but it often lasts a long time in the woods.

The toxicity of some plastics is a concern, more then plastic becoming litter in the environment. Chances are in the back country, on the farm dump, in the woods, plastic is not piling up. It’s getting burnt.🔥 It may not biodegrade by bacteria, but there is a natural process that breaks it down, namely fire, which leaves waste metals and glass untouched. Glass is just so much nastier in the sense it breaks, and doesn’t ever leave the woods unless somebody hauls it away to the landfill.

More needs to be done to reduce the toxicity of common wastes. Replacing PVC with HDPE is a big step forward. ♻I am glad to see things like soap bottles and charcoal lighter packing is no longer coming in vinyl, but instead safer plastics that produce fewer noxious chemicals when leached out to environment or burned. In urban areas, more needs to be done to recycle plastic — something that will get a boost when oil prices inevitably go back up.

Come 50 years from now, I doubt your going to find much in the way of plastics dumped in the woods. You might find metal (although less with the high value of scrap metal), glass, and certainly other things like discarded masonry and plumbing, but not plastic. ⛰ Plastic is lightweight packaging, and while it doesn’t biodegrade, it does combust and is unlikely to have the long-term pollution problems that alternative packaging is likely to have.