01-34 Single-Use Plastics

It is back in 1963 and I am taking a course in Marketing for a Masters degree in Business Administration. We were examining a glass bottle of Coca Cola that sold at your corner store for 25 cents. The cost of the product was only one cent. The rest was packaging, advertising and distribution.
Single-use plastic soft drink bottles were a monster saving. They were cheap, light, and something people could dump into their garbage can. Unfortunately, the word dump also means chucking it anywhere.
Now it is 20 years later, and on remote beaches all around the world you find plastic garbage being washed up.
Apparently, what is called the “plastic patch” is an area in the Pacific Ocean the size of France that is all plastic waste.
And even today, what we think is being recycled is often being shipped in boatloads to developing nations were people sort through the junk looking for plastic than can be used again in some manner. How much is ending up in landfills or being incinerated is never really well known.
The big deal today is cheap natural gas being discovered in the US using a process called hydraulic fracturing or “fracking”. This has created an American petrochemical boom.
The photo is of a petrochemical plant in Texas that uses ethane from natural gas to make ethylene. And from ethylene comes a range of plastics and a range of plastic products. Producing plastics is a very energy-intensive chemical process.
There is something like 300 of these plants recently constructed in the US taking advantage of the cheap raw material. The US is actually exporting ethane in a liquefied form to nations like China and India. Plastic production is big everywhere.
The sad message is that from fracking to the production of plastics you are putting greenhouse gases in the air. Something which neutralizes initiatives to remove greenhouse gases by replacing coal and natural gas power generation with renewables.
The positive initiative that can be explained and sold to the public is banning single-use plastics like straws, plastic bags, stir sticks, cutlery and that kind of thing. It looks like you are doing something, but the big item is plastic throw away bottles.
In Columbia, a child of about ten wanted to sell me a cigarette for a dollar. I asked him what he would do with the money. He said, “Coca Cola”. You could buy a dozen oranges for a dollar.