Plastic people, you're such a drag

Frank Zappa lyrics aren't exactly the first cultural referent I would expect to come clanging into my head standing on a Senegalese street corner, but clang it did, and got stuck there. The Senegalese, just like much of the rest of the world, are plastic people. Not in the Zappa-esque sense of overconsumption, though, but more literally. Day-to-day life here is wrapped thickly in plastic.

Most of us think of the plastic plague as an artifact of specifically Western consumerism, the kind that demands single-serving convenience and water in bottles and twenty layers of bag for everything. It's certainly enough of a horror even in the West, where our skills with waste-disposal generally keep the volume of plastic being disposed of far from the public eye. It goes to the recycling plant, or often to the dump, where the winds and the water grab a hell of a lot of it and carry it out to sea.

One of the more horrifying book chapters I've read recently was on just this subject. In Alan Weisman's "The World Without Us", he poses a thought experiment - what would happen if all human beings simply vanished? How long would the world take to recover? What elements of our lives on the planet would linger behind us the longest? The book is a fun read and generally good brain candy, so I won't go over all it's arguments here, but a few of his points about plastic are worth paraphrasing.

We've all heard different numbers quoted for how long plastic will take to biodegrade - 10,000 years, 25,000 years, whatever. What those numbers actually are are code for "we don't really know,but a really long time". No one, at this point, clearly understands the long term impact that plastic products are having and will have on the ecosystem. When we say "biodegrade", it isn't even clear what we mean in plastic's case. Although the forces of wind and water certainly do break down larger structures like bags, the molecular bonds of polymers are pretty durable. We aren't even all that sure that they'll break down at all. They may remain indefinitely in the ecosystem at microscopic sizes, small enough to saturate the biological systems of animals, especially sea life. In much of the ocean already, fish caught for research carry as much plastic as organic matter in their stomachs. Having only produced the first plastic consumer goods in the 40s, our grasp of the consequences is a bit limited.

It's pretty hard to grasp the scale at which all this is happening. I can walk down a Senegalese beach and swear at the thousands of empty water bottles, but I don't even know how to frame a thought about the patch of the Pacific the size of Texas (!) that is coated in plastic where the currents meet.

If it were simply a matter of greedy western folk gobbling Evians and dumping the results on the rest of the world, moral clarity would be a bit easier. It's more complicated than that, though. One thing travel in West Africa has taught me is the massive impact that plastic has had, by no means all negative.

To understand this, all you need to do is sit for an hour or two in a Senegalese bus station. Women come by every few seconds selling just about anything, all wrapped in tiny plastic bags. There are nuts, fruit, donuts, but most often there are drinks - water sellers and juice sellers all convey their wares in tiny plastic bags, tied off at the top. You bite the corner and suck the juice out of them, often waiting for the frozen bits to melt. It's a godsend in a sweaty bus station, and it does employ legions of women who would otherwise have no easy way to divide up their goods into lots small enough to sell.

Convenience, then, plays a part just as it does for us in the West. But single-use or otherwise small packagings of items also make up a big part of market business here for a simple reason: most households don't have enough cash on hand (or appropriate storage) to buy anything much in bulk, even if it would be cheaper over the long term. The prevalence of plastic allows a local woman to buy enough detergent for a single load of laundry, or have bags to carry home fruit each day. The short-term nature of the average consumption pattern, though, makes the environmental impact worse. If you get 5 plastic bags every time you go to the market, and you go every couple of days, that's a lot of added environmental stress.

Much is made of the ability of poor people to recycle, and indeed, people here can certainly not afford as much disgusting waste as we regularly engage in up North. It would be a mistake to overidealize, though. People throw things out all the time. Littering is universal, and you get strange looks for not doing it. Even if that plastic bag is re-used, it will get tossed eventually. When combined with the nonexistent or barely functional waste collection services, you get the universal scene of much of this planet: lot after empty lot coated in garbage, most of it plastic. It enters into the ecosystem the same way as at sea, as local livestock swallow bags and bits as they graze. It blows in the wind until it finds itself caught in trees. It flows down creeks and outlines the flows of the local watershed as the garbage gets to the sea. Once it arrives on the coast, it meets the waves of trans-Oceanic trash that wash up from around the world. It hurts the heart to look at - and it's at a scale far beyond simple cleanup.

So what the hell do we do? Some of you reading this might remember when a group of us made our way down to Waterloo Regional Council to argue in favour of a ban on bottled water in regional facilities. We were met by representatives of Nestle and the drink producers association who spat out consumer choice justifications for their product: "People want it! They should get what they want!" or "If you don't give them that, they'll just drink pop and get fat". The smug little fellows in suits even tried to bribe council with gifts of free recycling programs and other donations.

Thankfully, they lost. Hopefully, they continue to lose. The thing is, though,that consumer-choice arguments that might not hold water in the West, where we can easily afford the slight cost or inconvenience of living differently, carry a bit more weight where people's material life is more marginal. I am not comfortable lecturing a woman in a Senegalese bus station about plastic consumption, even though the impact on the environment of her product might be even worse than in the west, where it has a passable chance of being recycled.

Bans might, though, have some role to play. In India, Himachel Pradesh and Maharashtra have banned plastic bags (probably the worst offenders) already, and South Africa has banned the thin ones. The efficacy of the bans, though, remains to be seen - how exactly do you fine a subsistence farmer $2000? How do you justify it, ethically? This certainly is not the whole story.

A big part of the solution, I think, is the same as with many other developing-world environmental problems: raising people's income. Just as people with more money don't need to suffocate over charcoal and dung stoves, they also have the money to invest in bulk purchases of what they need. The problem here is obvious though: with more income also comes more things to get wrapped in plastic in the first place. There's no easy way out.

On the longer term, there may be scientific solutions. Truly biodegradeable replacements with measurable decay cycles may become common. We might even engineer organisms to eat the stuff - or they might evolve naturally in a plastic-soaked environment. At least a few sci-fi books have been written on this premise, with the obvious consequences of plastic-eating beasties providing good pulp fodder. Still, it may play a role.

At the end of the day, though, I think the best we can do is change our own behaviour and pour as much resources as we can into sustainable replacements. We have no moral authority to dictate anything else to the poor majority of the planet to whom plastic may have made a real difference. In any case, we do produce incredible masses of the stuff - and I doubt that the thousands of water bottles that I see washed up on the coast here were all emptied by thirsty Africans. More than anything else, I'd love to see those smug PR people from Nestle go for a stroll around a fishing village choked with them, and pick every single bloody one up. Grrmph.

In any case, it's a problem, and a big one. As much as I am loathe to portray Sub-Saharan Africa as the basket case of troubles that gets exposed to the West, there's just as much silliness in naively closing one's eyes. I don't know how to change this - but I do hope we figure it out.
Peace
Josh