Plastics are just another product that comes from fossil fuels such as oil, natural gas and coal. But unlike other products such as gasoline and cooking gas, plastics like polyethylene and polypropylene are very cheap. And the trend is for the price to drop further in the next few years.
In addition to the post-consumer problems that plastics cause, oil and fossil fuels have caused other damage of incalculable proportions on the planet: global warming. After everything we've seen since the beginning of the series and all the damage done mainly to our oceans, there's no denying that we need to stop consuming disposable plastics like we've been doing. And for this the industries need to invest in alternative packaging.
But does it make sense for them to invest in alternative packaging if plastic is so cheap? There is something that is not checking on this account, because plastic is not that cheap and that is what we are going to see today and I suggest you stay until the end of this episode. EPISODE 8: WHO PAYS THIS ACCOUNT?
EPISODE 8: WHO PAYS THIS ACCOUNT? What exactly is the economic weight of plastic in the environment? According to a UN study commissioned in 2014, plastic in the oceans costs us more than 13 billion dollars every year.
And this only includes expenses with beach cleaning, damage to the fishing industry and tourism. And this is a very conservative figure, because this same study suggests that if we add not only the damage to the oceans but also the costs of greenhouse gas emissions in the production and incineration of plastics, that figure can reach 75 billion dollars. And this study is 2014, so keep an eye open, because it only gets worse.
Plastic is not a cheap material. If you look at the entire lifecycle chain of plastic, it's expensive when iT comes to extraction, war, how it compromises people's health, who work in the petrochemical industry, is a dangerous field for people to work in. People who work in companies that process these materials and add these other chemicals to it, men who work in companies that are using bisphenol-a to create plastics, have a 40 to 60% drop in their sexual function.
That is not something that is cheap, that's expensive, and then it's coming back at us because we've suddenly created all this waste, just from buying some food. Right? It would be amazing, wouldn't it?
If fruit came with its own peel or package? Oh wait, it does. Who's paying the price of this?
We pay the price. We pay the price with our health, the environment, the ocean, our waterways, our neighborhoodS being polluted and looking disheveled and unsightly. But the thing is if you market things that people and you repeat it to them enough, then they believe you.
Right? So plastic is not a cheap material. We know that all oil products, directly, indirectly, from second, third, fourth generation, they tend to be very cheap because they have a factor of economies of scale.
But what I add is that plastic does not pay for the environmental damage it causes. If all products paid for the environmental damage it causes, plastic would be much more expensive. That's the point we bring, all products must pay for cause damage.
This has a name, it’s called externality. We need to put the cost of externalities into this account because governments around the world still use our money in the form of taxes to subsidize oil. But does it make sense, at 2018, to continue subsidizing oil?
Even with all the alternative sources of energy already discovered? And with all the costs that increase every year just to mitigate what oil does? When you take into account health care, cleanliness and environmental protection, you end up paying twice as much, maybe triple, what we have already paid back with our taxes.
And worse, ultimately the plastic industry pays no penny. This is called privatization of profits and socialization of losses. One of the things that we don't want to do is we don't want to move to materials that have a much bigger environmental burden and by that I mean a bigger carbon footprint and a bigger water footprint.
And the other thing we have to remember is the products that are packaged: What's the job that we're hiring that package to do? And so if it's for food, the footprint of the product that's in that package is much, much larger than the footprint of the package itself. And so when we have spoilage or when we have damage to products, we have a much bigger impact or environmental burdens for all the energy and materials that went into creating that food or making that product.
So we have to be careful that we don't sacrifice the job that we're hiring the product to do. So then the thing I would look at is, okay, if I understand what the environmental sort of burden is, then what's the recyclability. And one of the things that's happening, especially in Brazil, is a move to flexible packaging.
Flexible packaging has a much lower environmental footprint, but right now it's not collected. There's no value at its end of life. So I would argue that we need a really large AND.
We want to low carbon footprint AND we have to collect this material and we have to recover and recycle it in order for there to be a benefit. And if there is no value at the end of it's use, it's not going to get collected and it's going to become waste. And so the biggest issue is creating that value, creating that pull through for that material.
Because I don't think it's going to go away, because it is a very efficient way to keep the food fresh and to keep people able to buy the products that they want. So what we have to do as a society is say it's unacceptable for this to be one way. It has to be recovered and collected.
Collecting material that has been discarded and reintroducing it into the production chain, that is, recycling, is the most effective way today to prevent it from reaching the environment. But the way it does today is not enough, because we still don’t have a circular economy that think about products including what happens to them after consumption. Some companies have already taken the first steps, others are in the lead, such as the can industry, which achieves close to 100% recycling in Brazil and is a product designed to be recycled in full at the end of its useful life, as many times as necessary and without quality loss.
Here, at Ball Corporation, we've been in every different substrate, in terms of beverage packaging and, in fact, we were in plastic up until late 2010 or 2011 and we got out of plastics, specifically because from an environmental perspective, a social perspective and an economic perspective, it was not sustainable. Because you can't have recycling without good collection and if you get good collection, that's when we started. Then you have to recycle, but I know with the aluminum beverage cans, which is the only substrate with real value, real economic value, if you can get that collection right, you'll get that recycling rate.
I say that because with plastic it's not the case. You can collect, but that doesn't mean you will recycle, because if there's no economic reason to recycle, it's not going to be recycled and that's one of the problems with plastic today. There is just not an economic reason to recycle and so yes, you can collect, but don't ever confuse collection with recycling.
I can say though, we can say though, with aluminum beverage cans when you collect, you do recycle. But when we talk about plastics and products made of polymers like tires, collecting is not the only solution, because the amount of waste generated is absurd. There needs to be creativity in the design of the new products that they can become, preferably products that have longer useful lives.
Think of each material is a little bit differently. So what I started to talk about, is when we think of aluminum, it's a metal and it can be recycled indefinitely. So the footprint of the material in its second use is 90% less than the environmental footprint in it's first use.
So it totally makes sense to recycle it and you can recycle it into things that are other than cans, bicycles or trucks or airplanes, whatever else. So that circularity, there's a tiny loop that comes back to the original product, but there's a bunch of bigger loops. The same is true for plastics, but we don't do that today.
We just think about mechanical recycling. We don't think about chemical recycling. So once we kind of recognize that we really have to clean up this mess, chemical recycling will take a broad variety of those materials and allow us to put them back into virgin products.
We're going through a complete rethink as we speak, because the world around us is changing as we speak and we need to be looking forward on what are the new ways and what are the more advanced ways of doing this, as opposed to looking backward and say: "This is the way we've always done it". I have two children that are 21 and 18 years old and their generation is so much more advanced in terms of understanding the longer term implications of what we do as human beings and they too have helped educate me just through the way they live, on understanding the importance, because if we're not taking responsibilities, as humans on this Earth, who is going to? We can't push off our responsibility to other people and feel good about ourselves.
And so I think those are two things that has been a journey for me, but it really is come to roost, then. We have a planet that we are degrading and if we're not taking responsibility for it, then who is? Yeah.
There is no miracle product and no magic law that will turn the reality in a snap. And that's why we have to start thinking circular and holistically and keep pushing companies to take the disposable packaging out of the market, the ones designed to be used once and then just thrown away. And for that we have the power.
And that's why every episode I leave to you a new challenge. And for the next two weeks that’s one I love: take a product and tag in the social networks the company you like, the one you want to keep buying, but you don’t agree with the packaging. Let us together press for this change in society.
And in the next episode, we'll talk more about the circular economy and how it works. So if you have not yet subscribed for the channel, do it now and turn on notifications so you’ll know firsthand what's going on. And share it with your friends, we need to get this information to reach more people, because together, really, we are stronger and we will make the transformation!
