🗑 The talk about recycling plastic is mostly trash
Literally! As plastic is still more costly to recycle than to dispose of and as new plastic is cheap, plastic recycling hasn’t really been happening. According to a PBS/NPR investigation, “these problems have existed for decades, no matter what new recycling technology or expensive machinery has been developed. In all that time, less than 10 percent of plastic has ever been recycled. But the public has known little about these difficulties.”
Source: United States Environmental Protection Agency
The PBS/NPR investigation underlines how the oil and plastic industry has pushed ads that “sounded like an environmentalist's message […] promoting the benefits of a product that, for the most part, was buried, was burned or, in some cases, wound up in the ocean.” And it’s easy to understand why as the “oil industry makes more than $400 billion a year making plastic, and as demand for oil for cars and trucks declines, the industry is telling shareholders that future profits will increasingly come from plastic.”
“Of the 8.3 billion metric tons that has been produced, 6.3 billion metric tons has become plastic waste.” To put this into perspective: “If present trends continue, by 2050, there will be 12 billion metric tons of plastic in landfills. That amount is 35,000 times as heavy as the Empire State Building.”
🐛 A bug's life
The Living Planet Report 2020 shows that animal populations around the world shrank by 68% between 1970 and 2016. Disparities between regions are significant but the trend is global.
When it comes to insects, the picture is murkier as “most evidence comes from Europe, […] leaving uncertainty about insect population trends worldwide.”
Speaking of insects, wax worms’ ability to eat plastic - more exactly polyethylene - was discovered three years ago by Federica Bertocchini, a developmental biologist at the University of Cantabria in Spain. While no scalable solution has yet emerged, the idea is to identify the molecule responsible for the degradation of polyethylene.
🤓 No sh*t Sherlock
Polyethylene (PE): PE is is the most common plastic in use today, it is mainly used for packaging and accounts for more than 30% of the total demand for plastic products worldwide.
Polypropylene (PP): Polypropylene is the second-most widely produced commodity plastic (after polyethylene).
Feeling like your knowledge about PE and PP is a bit, ahem, plastic-y? Dive deeper, here.
📢 The rest is familiar noise
The art of the deal: The blooming romance between Microsoft and TikTok didn’t turn into a relationship as TikTok picks Oracle over the Seattle-based giant. The idea of a deal was originally born out of security concerns which raises questions about the sale to Oracle.
Weathering without you: Yoshihide Suga became Japan’s 99th Prime Minister on Wednesday, putting an end to the administration led by his predecessor Shinzo Abe — the longest in modern Japanese history. Shinzo Abe resigned on August 28th citing health concerns.
