Breaking The Plastic Habit

The silence and the staying at home gives time for reflection.  That is something I have missed during the last few years.  My inner voice.  Where did it go?  Like a dreamless sleep, it leaves me wondering, what happened?  My inner voice is my waking dream, one that I have a dialogue with, instead of a monologue of responses to needs from the outside world.

So during the past few days I was thinking about what to write next, and - what is my voice?  You who are reading this, and I hope there will be readers other than myself, will have to be part of the discovery.  Because there is no way for me to find my voice unless I do this, or get up and speak to an audience.  There are no public gatherings aloud, so here we are.  My guess is that, suddenly, you will be hearing my voice as I discover it, like in “ A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”.  Not that I am the literary genius of James Joyce.  But close, I tell myself.

Yesterday was Easter.  My wife and kids and I colored eggs, walked along the beach, had an Easter hunt, and ate a lot of candy, and food.  The egg hunt is still popular with the teens.  That’s because my wife, Andrea, upped the prize to five dollar bills in some of the eggs.  I told them that I put “edibles” in some of them.  That got some laughs, and was even more motivating.  I didn’t.  But I might next year.

I was talking with my daughter about a new enzyme that eats plastic.  You could say that she suffers from “climate anxiety”.  This is a real thing that many people suffer from.  When I was her age, it was anxiety over the nuclear holocaust, so this is their world ending challenge they must stare down. More on that later.

A group of scientists discovered an enzyme that breaks down plastic. They discovered it in a pile of leaves.  No surprise, but nature made a remedy for our mess.  For the past several years, scientists have been genetically modifying this enzyme to be better at eating plastic, and they are successful.  Now the enzyme breaks down plastic in 10 hours and makes it ready for recycling into food grade plastic.  This is a big achievement.  Previously you could make only a few items from recycled plastic.  Now this creates a low energy solution for complete recycling.  It’s not earth shattering news to most people, but maybe if there was a video of the process, starring Kim Kardashian, it would get people's attention. Look for that soon.

Of course I think plastic should mostly go away, definitely single use plastic.  China has rolled out a plan to ban single use plastic by the end of this year, as Asia has the worst problem with plastic pollution.  This morning I learned that it is mostly plastic straws, and plastic bags. It’s a start, but the ban needs to go much further.

So I walked through this with my daughter, what a complete ban on single use plastic would look like.  So, Starbucks starts using washable mugs.  This gets rid of paper cups and plastic lids, even the compostable ones, which are still not very sustainable in reality, but better.  It creates a lot of new jobs, but uses much more water.  Now we have a different problem, depletion of the local aquifers.  She pointed out that more people are bringing in reusable mugs that they wash at home.  Except now they are banned due to the virus, and I am guessing that will not change any time soon, as the virus, or the fear of it, will be with us for a long while.

It’s a trade off, sustainability.  One thing affects another.  Push on one side of the scale, and another goes up. Except it's more like a circular scale, where any weight on one point affects the other point in the opposite. It’s rare to find something that brings down many depletions at once. I think the one common factor is human behavior.  Alter that, and it’s the most likely way to restore balance.

Look for Kim Kardashian to explain all of this, to Donald Trump, very soon.