Garden gate
Before the weather turned too cold, I finally got round to hanging the new garden gate that I actually built months ago.
It was that or gardening. I hate gardening. I dislike doing a job that doesn’t stay done. You do something in the garden and a few weeks later you have to do it again! For a similar reason, I resented building this gate. We’ve lived here a while so this is the 3rd gate I’ve built. The last 2 were wooden kits that just rotted away. So this time I decided I would build a gate that would outlast me. So I found a source of lumber made from recycled plastic and built the gate from that.
Problem is it won't last forever. UV, moisture, temperature fluctuations and organisms destroy everything eventually so my gate will last longer than its wooden predecessors but will still disintegrate in time. And when it does, unlike its organic predecessors, the material will never fully break down – instead microscopic particles of plastic will enter the soil and then the water table and then the food chain.
As research is showing, one inevitable conclusion of this process is that these microscopic particles are now showing up in human blood. This is the unseen but bigger problem than high profile issues such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Micro-particles of plastic are estimated to already weigh over half a million tonnes and are literally everywhere – even in Antarctic Krill and fresh Antarctic snowfall.
Recently the team at Interactual Limited and JNDC Ltd has been involved in several projects attempting to catch these particles at source. The Tyre Collective is developing tech to collect the particles of rubber that abrade off tyres during contact with the road. Tyres wear out – where did you think the worn-off bits went? Then there’s Matter., a start-up that has developed tech to collect the micro-particles of clothes that washing machines carry away in wastewater.
These are laudable projects but the issue is what do you do with the waste? To make collection affordable they need a commercially viable end-use. The problem is that no matter what you do with plastic waste, ultimately you’ll always end up facing the same problem of ultimate disposal. And every time a plastic is reprocessed it degrades – it’s functional properties decline. So unlike a material like aluminium, where 75% of all the material produced in history is still in use, plastics eventually become so degraded that they have little functional value any more.
We can extend the lifespan of a plastic product through the use of additives. For example UV stabilisers slow degradation in sunlight. But the material ceases to be a mono-material so becomes harder to re-process and when finally the plastic finds it’s way into the environment, releases even more harmful toxins as the material degrades.
So what ultimately do you do with plastics that are highly degraded? This waste can be captured for the long term within building or road materials. But eventually roads get scarified and buildings demolished and again the plastics are released into the environment. Or the plastics can be incinerated for energy generation. But you still have toxic, non-degradable ash to deal with.
So why can’t we just stop using plastics? Well, the problem is that they are just so damn ubiquitous. They can be moulded to almost any shape and present an astonishing range of material properties that make them, for example, slippy, grippy, bendy, stiff, conductive, foamy, rubbery, insulative, malleable, springy, thermally reactive and resistive, hygroscopic, hydrophobic and anti-bacterial. And moulding technologies can spit out plastic parts like sweeties so parts can be made in huge volumes and for next to nothing.
The functionality that they offer is now so embedded in modern life that they are written into some health and safety standards now. There are, for example, medical and food products that legislation will not allow to be built except in certain grades of plastic.
It’s this ubiquity that makes it so hard for us to reverse away from plastics. Think of almost any day-to-day product made of plastic. Try to imagine what else it could be made from. And then consider the cost of that alternative. Face it – we are all addicted to plastic and, if you think as a species we are struggling to give up fossil fuels, wait until we actually get serious about giving up plastics! (we haven’t yet incidentally).
It’s no accident then that considerable time and effort is being invested in the development of organic plastics. At this point we need to consider the confusing terminology being used around these.
Compostable plastics turn into compost, right? Well, no, not always. Some types of compostable packaging simply break down into smaller pieces like microplastics. Most compostable packaging also doesn't carry high quality nutrients like organic materials that would generally be composted, which is why some say the compost that comes out of it— if processed correctly — is extremely low quality.
But a plastic that is biodegradable is good right? Not necessarily. Biodegradable simply means that an item can be broken down into increasingly smaller pieces by bacteria, fungi or microbes to be reabsorbed by the surrounding environment. The trouble is, everything we use or create can be called biodegradable because eventually everything will break down – from organic waste and wooden cutlery to plastic packaging or steel machinery. It could just take a very, very, very long time. As a result this is probably the most misunderstood, misused and abused term in the green lexicon.
The reality is that there are very few organic plastics that breakdown into pure natural organic components and those that do exist have limited properties and therefore limited applications.
So do I feel guilty about my new garden gate? In my head I assuage my guilt by the fact that the material I’ve used is already recycled. But the reality is that I’m leaving a few kilos of plastic outside to gradually decompose into micro-plastics ironically because the wooden alternatives decompose too fast!
I’d like to suggest that we need a Space-X style award for this. This problem really isn’t getting nearly enough media exposure but I guess it’s also not very sexy because the evidence is so small that it’s literally hidden from view. So perhaps the first step is for everyone to recognise in themselves that our way of life is now entirely dependent on plastic and that it’s just not enough to reduce, reuse or recycle or to give up single use plastic– we absolutely must give up fossil fuel-based plastic entirely.
My name is Ben May and I’m a plastic addict…