Circular Economies

To slow the release of carbon into the atmosphere, we can turn to renewable energy and biodegradable packaging, but to stop it, we need to return to a circular economy, with localized nodes all over the world.

Our current global and local economies depend on "natural resources" and "human resources" with the assumption that these are limitless, that the earth possesses or will continue to generate enough raw materials for the endless production and transport of new goods. In fact, many of our global industries depend not just on stable markets, but continuously growing ones, for financial stability. We have now reached the point where this will no longer allow for environmental sustainability.

In order to reach a point of truly circular economy, we need to reuse, recycle, compost, or burn (as fuel) everything we produce. And we're doing a terrible job at that.

While glass and metals can readily be recycled and similar products created, with less energy output than refining new materials, recycling plastic is much more difficult. Plastic, once produced, can't be melted down and re-used in the same form.

Water bottles (#1 plastic), for instance, can be made into fleece sweaters, but not into new plastic water bottles. There's a problem, though: every time you launder that fleece, you release microplastics into your town sewer system, and they end up in the ocean where they're killing wildlife.

Here's a table from Oxford University that summarizes how plastics are generally recycled by communities:

Go here for the full-size image

It turns out, though, that the situation isn't quite as dire, in theory: Plastics labeled  #2, #3, #4, and #5 can be turned into plastic wood. The town of Long Branch started a program last year to recycle plastic bags and wrappers (#4). They promised a park bench after 500 pounds of packaging was collected, and this January, the first bench was installed near Lake Takanassee.

Meanwhile, the town of Middletown, NJ recently opened a styrofoam recycling center, open to residents of the entire county. It only collects styrofoam used in packaging and shipping, not food-grade products, so you still need to get a reusable mug for your Dunkin Donuts coffee, and avoid take-out that's packaged in styrofoam.

There's a breakdown, however, been theory and practice. Between 1950 and 2015, the amount of plastic products produced annually rose almost 200-fold, from 2 million metric tons per year to 381 million metric tons, and only 9 percent of that was recycled.

We need to do better, and when it comes to plastics we need to address this in several different ways.

Governments need to enact carbon taxes to encourage corporate and individual consumers to use less carbon, by making it more expensive.

Producers of plastic products need to do a better job of making containers out of more easily recyclable products when possible, researching and developing biodegradable containers, and avoiding excess packaging.

Consumers need to send a message through individual purchases and buying habits that we don't want plastic. We need to:

• stop buying bottled water and other products packaged in single-use plastics
• refuse excess packaging, for instance when we buy loose produce
• advocate with local and state governments to enact plastic bag bans, and meanwhile make the choice to use reusable bags for our shopping
• boycott Dunkin Donuts and other corporations that still use styrofoam instead of paper hot drink cups, and tell them why

... and more. Those are starting points, not end points. We need to move to an economy where everything we produce can be repurposed in some way. It's going to take imagination and persistence. If we don't do it voluntarily, the effects of climate crisis will force the issue.

Media Fail to Explain Climate Crisis Role in Weather Events

From Public Citizen, via email. Key information: 7.2 percent of television coverage and 2.5 percent of news coverage in the top television stations and newspapers mentioned climate change in coverage of Hurricane Dorian.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Although Hurricane Dorian exemplifies what climate scientists have warned about, major U.S. media outlets are failing to connect the climate crisis to the strongest Atlantic storm ever to hit land, a Public Citizen analysis shows.

Scientists say that global warming makes hurricanes intensify faster, dump more rain and move more slowly. All these things have happened with Dorian; it has moved over water that is warmer than usual, intensified at an unprecedented rate, dumped 24 inches of rain on parts of the Bahamas and slowed to a crawl, moving at as little as 1 mile per hour.

But between Friday and Monday, climate or global warming was mentioned in just 7.2% of the 167 pieces on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC and Fox. The top 49 newspapers by circulation didn’t do much better. Of them, 32 covered Dorian in their print editions, but only eight papers connected Dorian to climate. Of 363 articles about Dorian in those papers’ print editions, just nine (2.5%) mentioned climate change.

“It is mind-boggling that major media outlets can report about a storm of epic proportions that is exactly what climate scientists have warned about yet fail to mention two key words: ‘climate change,” said Allison Fisher, outreach director for Public Citizen’s Energy Program. “We can’t address the looming climate catastrophe if we aren’t talking about it.”

Meanwhile, Dorian is still lingering over the Bahamas, and damage reports are still coming in. The storm is growing and will head next to the East Coast of the U.S. As reporters cover this story, Public Citizen is urging them to include climate change.

Public Citizen’s analysis was a snapshot; it didn’t include online stories, and because of a limitation of the database, it didn’t include the Wall Street Journal. Because Public Citizen looked at top papers by circulation, many significant local dailies were not included, such as The Palm Beach Post and The Post and Courier in South Carolina. The same is true of papers that cover Capitol Hill, like The Hill, Politico and Roll Call. This analysis also does not include radio, local television or online news articles.

The results are in line with media coverage of Hurricanes Florence and Michael last year. A Public Citizen survey found that of the 24,968 total pieces mentioning Hurricanes Florence and Michael in 2018, climate change was mentioned in only 10% of online news pieces, 8% of television news transcripts and 5% of print news articles. This was, however, an improvement from 2017, when the rates were 6% for online media and television and 3% for newspapers.