I grew up hearing about ocean plastics, and I have seen them in life a couple times. The fact that they have been around for as long as I have been around makes me think they are part of the nature just like sand and stones, but the truth is, they really aren’t. They are man-made wastes that could threaten marine lives and would not biodegrade like other natural substances. The article What Would It Take to Get Plastics Out of the Ocean gives me a clearer picture on how much of these man-made wastes are really out there and being ignored.

As we have all heard of the “island of plastics”, in fact, there are five of them floating in our ocean, with a sixth one about to form near the Arctic. If we step in and conduct a massive cleanup right now, it would require 1,000 boat to filter the water 24 hours a day for 79 years. This sort of gives us the magnitude of how much plastics are out there, but there is still great variability in research numbers because there are tiny plastics, called micro- or nano-plastics, that are extremely hard to detect.

What surprised me was not only the presence of micro-plastics, but also the products that contain these micro-plastics. For examples, cosmetics and cleaning agents both contain plastics in their formulas. For years, we focused on reducing the usage of products that obviously contain plastics, but we overlooked the products that contains plastics but does not have a plastic finishing, and their impact is just as large and might be even harder to reverse.

The article has mentioned a couple proposed solutions to the problem, such as installing a trash-intercepting waterwheel that would skim garbage from the surface of the river before it could float downstream and fixing a filtering platform on the seabed to catch trash. Most of them remained a concept still due to public critics and controversies; a major critic being that instead of finding ways to clean up, we should avoid making waste in the first place, and redesign the plastic we really need. I agree with the front-end thinking, but I also think that adaption measures are equally important because they can buy us time to redesign plastics and change consumer behaviour. At the end of the day, we still have to clean up the waste that is already there.

This is rather a disappointing news. Best Buy, a company that used to recycle any used electronic products from customer for free, now has to charge a $25 fee for every TV and computer monitor drop-off. This is mainly due to the increasing amount of e-waste received, leading to higher recycling and transportation costs, and also the fact that the company is the sole e-recycling provider in many towns in the U.S.

The news makes me reflect on my own behaviour of disposing e-waste. For the past ten years, I have possessed four cell phones and two laptops. Every time I get a new cell phone, I have trouble finding ways to get rid of the old one. I could have sold them, but it has been increasingly hard to sell seconded phones because they become outdated so soon given the pace of technology advancement today. I knew I should not disposal them along with other household waste, but I had no idea how to dispose them responsibly. So, at the end they ended up in the storage room. Out of sight. It was only until recently that a separated bin was assigned for the disposal of electronic products at my apartment building. Still, I have no idea where these e-waste are being sent to and whether or not they are getting the proper treatment. There is simply far too few legitimate places to dispose e-waste responsibly and laws regarding the process.

I also think that electronic manufacturers should bear their own share of recycling responsibility by having an inclusive recycling program like the ones offered by Best Buy and Dell. A cradle-to-cradle process design is fundamental to sustainable operation in the e-industry, especially when material costs are rising rapidly due to the declining resource availability. On top of its environmental benefits, companies can recycle and reuse certain components, such as gold, to generate significant cost savings. Therefore, I believe there is a business case for recycling e-waste, and manufacturers should switch their mindset around to see e-recycling as an opportunity rather a liability.

Article Reference: http://www.greenbiz.com/article/too-much-good-thing-hobbles-best-buys-e-waste-recycling