Recycling plastic here in B.C. is straightforward and easy. Simply sort your items into those blue bins and leave them out on weekly collection days. No headache, no hassle and no hidden conspiracy, right?
CBC’s Marketplace found out exactly otherwise. In an investigative report released this past weekend, by placing trackers in bales of plastic commissioned to be recycled, they found that only one out of three waste collection businesses with links to B.C.’s municipal recycling programs ended up recycling the plastic. What did the other two businesses do with their plastic? One dumped it in a landfill. The other brought it to a waste-to-energy facility, where it was incinerated, and what remained was then dumped in a landfill.
What was established instead, was that only 9% of Canadian plastic ended up being recycled. Which begs the question, what happens to the rest? In Canada, 2.8 million tonnes were thrown away as garbage. Ending up in landfills or oceans. On a global scale, 8 million tonnes go into the oceans annually. In the ocean, plastics are then weathered under the influence of solar UV radiation into miniscule fragments called, “microplastics”.
Microplastics are either consumed by marine life or wash up along the shores of beaches. On beaches, they become a habitat in which bacteria can proliferate. With a recent study finding a vast array of bacterial communities thriving on the surfaces of microplastics sampled from beaches and coastal regions in Singapore. Some of the bacteria found were harmful, being linked to the bleaching of corals or infection of open wounds. But some bacteria species identified were able biodegrade plastic, offering a potential solution towards solving the plastic pollution issue.
It should be clear by now that the accumulation of plastic pollution in the oceans is bad. Further compounding this is the ineffectiveness of recycling. So, what does that leave residents of B.C. to do? Reduce and Reuse. The onus once again falls on the individual to be ever more vigilant, and more responsible for minimizing their part in the use of plastic.
– Ryan Chew
