Why SA should not ban single-use plastics: Ivo Vegter - Biznews

In a provocative rebuttal to calls for banning single-use plastics, Ivo Vegter challenges Melanie Verwoerd’s stance in Daily Maverick. Highlighting disparities in plastic pollution impact and questioning the efficacy of bans, Vegter argues for nuanced approaches to waste management over sweeping prohibitions. With insights into global plastic consumption and environmental impacts, the piece questions whether bans truly address the root causes of plastic pollution.”

Ivo Vegter

In Daily Maverick, Melanie Verwoerd makes the case for banning single-use plastics. Here’s the counter-argument.

“South Africa was a trailblazer with the plastic bag levy,” writes Melanie Verwoerd, a former ANC MP turned columnist, in Daily Maverick,“but we have since fallen behind in terms of anti-plastic legislation.”

Verwoerd correctly identifies a significant problem. Some beaches are littered with washed-up refuse, which includes plastic items. Since most plastic floats, it will, like other flotsam and jetsam, wash up periodically on certain beaches. 

Where exactly it comes ashore is highly dependent on winds and currents, and we should not assume Verwoerd’s experience on the beach at Kommetjie is representative. For example, I find plastic litter to be a fairly minor problem on the beaches near where I live along the Garden Route, and one can walk long stretches without seeing any at all. 

Having identified plastic litter as a problem – and I’ll gladly add that it also poses environmental problems on land – Verwoerd, being schooled in the authoritarian style of the ANC, produces from her grab-bag of policies one of the few tools available to authoritarians, a ban-hammer.

In support of a ban on single-use plastics, she makes a number of claims, but omits important context and key facts. 

Animal deaths
She makes much of the supposed impact of plastic pollution on the ocean and marine life. While it is undoubtedly true that some marine animals, as well as birds, succumb to plastic pollution in some way, it is far from clear that this is a truly widespread or impactful phenomenon.

There are conflicting claims about the numbers. National Geographic says: “An estimated 100 000 marine animals are strangled, suffocated, or injured by plastics every year.”

It links to a source that doesn’t actually contain that number. 

Environmental news website Earth.Org says: “We find about 100,000 marine animals killed by ocean plastic ingestion or entanglement each year, and this is only the tip of the iceberg.”

It adds: “Approximately 1 million sea birds also die from plastic annually.”

It doesn’t cite any sources at all. 

The Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) says: “While it’s difficult to know exactly how many marine animals are killed by plastic pollution, it’s been estimated that plastic pollution kills 100,000 marine mammals every year.”

It uses the word “mammals” instead of “animals”, which makes a very significant difference, but it also doesn’t cite a source.

Let’s err on the cautious side by taking the iceberg metaphor literally, multiplying the estimates by ten. In fact, let’s throw caution to the wind entirely, and multiply these estimates by ten again. 

Let us, therefore, suppose that a million marine animals and ten million birds die annually as a result of ingesting or becoming entangled in plastic.

Perspective
Now, let’s put this in perspective. 

According to a study in Nature, cats kill between 1.3 billion and 4.0 billion birds per year, in the United States alone. 

The Smithsonian Magazine says there are approximately 50 billion birds in the world. A hundred million, our two-orders-of-magnitude over-estimate, is 0.2% of this total, or one in 500. The true total is likely closer to one in 5 000, and the provable total is about one in 50 000. 

And don’t forget, birds are a renewable resource.

It is harder to put 10 million marine animals in perspective, since there is no estimate of a total population. However, the world produces about 200 million tons of seafood every year, and very few marine animals weigh a ton or more, so once again we’re dealing with a very small fraction of the total population.

Fishing – and the tragedy of the commons – are a far greater threat to marine animal populations than plastic pollution will ever be.

Plastic pollution
Verwoerd notes: “The amount of litter washing up daily around Cape Town has tripled from 1994 to 2011, far outstripping the 60% growth in the city’s human population over the same period.”

That is not as much of a puzzle as she appears to think, since very little of the litter washing up around Cape Town comes from Cape Town itself. 

The poster child for oceanic pollution is the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It isn’t easily detectable, either from the air or from the surface, but in this great gyre of currents, the density of plastic pollution is higher than elsewhere. 

A 2018 study of this gyre found that it contains 79 000 metric tons of plastic. Again, that sounds like a lot, until you realise that it’s only 0.026% of the 300 million tons of plastic we produce per year. 

Verwoerd claims that eight million tons of plastic waste enters the oceans every year, and while I’ll take her word for it, that’s only 2.67% of all the plastic that is produced.

That said, the Garbage Patch study found that fishing nets account for 46% of the plastic that comprises it, and most of the rest consists of other items discarded by the fishing industry, such as ropes, crates, and baskets. A further 20% of the debris is attributable to the 2011 tsunami in Japan.

That leaves very little for which one can blame the use of single-use plastics by consumers.

Then one has to consider that a mere ten rivers account for between 88% and 94% of all the land-based plastic pollution that enters the world’s oceans, none of which are in South Africa.

Thinking that a single-use plastics ban in South Africa will make any meaningful impact on plastic pollution on Kommetjie beach is, quite simply, fantasy.

I’ve written before about the true nature and scale of plastic pollution. It is routinely exaggerated, simply by using scary-big numbers without context. 

Micro-plastics
“Shockingly, microplastics are also finding its way into our water supply and into our bodies, which could have devastating long-term health implications for us all,” writes Verwoerd.

This isn’t shocking at all. When the small particles are made of any other material, we simply call it dust, and yes, dust does get everywhere. Some dust, such as sawdust, concrete dust, metal dust and certain fibres, are in principle, and in large concentrations, harmful, too.

One problem with her observation is that she conflates microplastics with plastic litter, as if litter is the source of most microplastics. It isn’t. A study of fish in the English Channel found that 93.4% of all the microplastics found in their guts came not from plastic items, but from clothing fibres. Perhaps Verwoerd should be campaigning to ban synthetic textiles, instead.

The bigger problem with her expression of shock, however, is the weasel-word “could”. 

There is little convincing evidence that microplastics cause significant harm, either in the environment, or to human health. There’s lots of speculation and publication about potential and unquantified harms, but, as one study says, “the available experimental data are still fragmentary and controversial”.

The mere presence of microplastics is not enough to condemn plastic. 

Plastic bag levy
Verwoerd refers to the plastic bag levy, as if it was some sort of great success. 

“Although the levy did make a slight dent in terms of decreasing the use of single-use plastic bags in South Africa,” wrote Dominic Naidoo, an environmental activist and one of News24’s 100 Young Mandelas for 2023, for The African, “it did not have the intended impact on overall plastic pollution, which continues to spiral out of control.”

He also points out that the revenue from this tax has not been ring-fenced to support improved plastic recycling or waste management. It simply disappeared “into the black hole of our national fiscus”.

Worse, however, the levy did prompt several upmarket retailers to replace bags made from thin polyethylene with paper or canvas alternatives. While not posing the same problems as plastic bags, these come with serious environmental issues of their own.

As I wrote in a recent appeal to bring back plastic bags, a Danish life-cycle assessment of grocery carrier bags found you need to use a paper shopping bag 43 times to reduce its environmental impact to that of an ordinary plastic shopping bag. A composite bag made of jute, polypropylene and cotton needs to be used 870 times, a pure cotton bag 7 100 times, and an organic cotton bag an astonishing 20 000 times, if you want the low environmental impact of the humble plastic shopping bag, from cradle to grave.

Non-plastic alternatives to plastic are not only more expensive, but they’re worse for the environment than plastic.

Plastic is great
There’s a reason we use plastic. 

Plastic refers to a broad range of materials, all of which have properties that no other materials on the planet can compete with. They can be strong, stiff, flexible, ultra-thin, malleable, durable, tough, permeable, impermeable, heat-resistant, impact-resistant, corrosion-resistant, weather-resistant, and above all, cheap. 

Plastic has replaced expensive materials like paper, clay, wood and metal in all sorts of applications because it is demonstrably, and often uniquely, better. 

In 2022, I wrote an ode to plastic, championing the great many advantages it has over traditional building, manufacturing and packaging materials. It has contributed tremendously to improvements in food hygiene and the medical industry. I added another slew of arguments for why plastics should be celebrated, not fought, in 2023. 

Replacing single-use plastics with other materials will have broad implications. It will make product packaging heavier, less durable and more permeable, with all the disadvantages that this entails. It will, like with the bag scenario, cost consumers more, while also having a worse environmental footprint from resource harvesting to final disposal. 

The additional costs and increased risks that consumers would have to incur if single-use plastics were banned are simply not tolerable in a country where at last count (in 2015) almost 50% of the population lived below the upper-bound poverty line.

Virtue-signalling
Virtue-signalling with bamboo cutlery, canvas bags or straws made from reusable metal (yuck!) or single-use waxed paper (double yuck!) may be fashionable among the sort of people who spend their weekends on Kommetjie beach, but they’re neither practical nor affordable for ordinary people.

Plastic pollution is a problem. The solution to plastic pollution is not, however, to ban single-use (or any other) plastics. 

That’s like saying road safety is a problem, and the solution is to ban cars.

A ban would be a gross and unjustifiable over-reach of government power.

Having written fairly extensively on the subject over the years, I have also written about the real solution. 

As Naidoo, the aforementioned environmental activist, wrote: “The problem with plastic pollution arises from illegal dumping and bad waste disposal practices, combined with inadequate waste collection services. Around the country, consumers resort to dumping their waste because refuse collection services are either unreliable or non-existent.”

My own conclusion was similar: “Between addressing fishing gear plastic in the ocean, ocean cleanups, developing well-designed landfill sites, and anti-litter campaigns – especially in developing countries – whatever threat plastic pollution poses to the environment could be a thing of the past in a decade or two.”

The problem isn’t plastic. It is how we dispose of that plastic. The solution isn’t a ban. It is better disposal management, and better disposal management isn’t rocket science. It is entirely achievable. 

Unfortunately, this doesn’t have the side-effect of making wealthy elites feel guilty about their materialistic consumption, which is perhaps the true goal of left-wing authoritarians like Melanie Verwoerd.

Ivo Vegter is a freelance journalist, columnist and speaker

https://www.biznews.com/rational-perspective/2024/07/16/single-use-plastics-ivo-vegter

This article was first published on the Daily Friend.