A ton recycled does not cancel a ton used.
The voyage of the Resolute, and the evolution of a plastic standard. This is a dispatch from May 2019, kept here as written. What it argued then is still true, and the industry still has not acted on it.
When Charles Darwin set off on his voyage of discovery in the Beagle, he little knew the ramifications that journey would have. Afterwards it took him 28 years to get The Origin of Species into print, only to stun and, in many cases, to offend, the scientific world and the public with his ideas.
When I boarded the plane for Bermuda in May 2019, for a voyage of discovery on the RCGS Resolute, I also was unaware just what the result would be. All I knew was, I had been invited to be part of an expedition to examine plastic in the North Atlantic Gyre, one of a number of places where we are finding more and more plastic in the ocean.
The RCGS Resolute at a sargassum bed. Photo by Bryan Liscinsky
Making the trip with me were over 150 stakeholders from all sides of the plastics question: sustainability executives from giant corporations, CEOs, scientists, major recyclers and some household-name environmental NGOs. We were going in search of plastics and, more importantly, solutions.
The fourth, the desire to work together, was the most important, and was an attribute everyone on the expedition shared.
With another member of the voyage, Virginie Helias of P&G. Photo by Daniel Aronson
Darwin himself would have found it difficult to classify just what species of voyage this was. Neither a cruise nor a conference, exactly. It was not a purely scientific expedition, though there was science going on, and the Resolute has a full-time research lab. Rather, it was an amalgam of all of these. It worked because many who might, in their daily jobs, be working on different sides of the plastics question put all that aside and spent four days working intensely, side by side, to build structures and frameworks and working groups and models to figure out what the heck to do about ocean plastics.
A working session on the Resolute. Photo by Bryan Liscinsky
Off to the sargassum in search of ocean plastic. Photo by Yarrow Kraner
This was all part of the 2019 Ocean Plastics Leadership Summit, organized and led by Soul Buffalo, which hosts, in their own words, invitation-only gatherings that unite esteemed stakeholders to translate sustainability commitments and goals into meaningful action. In this case, the stakeholders were united in their commitment to create those commitments and goals. Despite the clear and pervasive issue of plastics in our waters, there is not the comprehensive set of goals and plans we need as a planet to tackle it. So for four days, we worked on exactly that.
I am not sure what Darwin's schedule was like but in our case, it was 12 hours a day focused on ocean plastics. We had plenary presentations, spent more than a dozen hours in our working groups, and snorkeled in a sargassum patch with the seabed almost a mile and a half below, dodging Portuguese Man-o-Wars in search of microplastics. We trawled for a mile or more in each direction and had the contents analyzed for plastics.
Plastics in the sargassum. Photo by Bryan Liscinsky
Up to now, plastic neutral has been measured using weight. A ton used, a ton recycled. This does not make sense, and it is not a solid foundation on which to build our efforts to combat plastic in the environment.
Consider greenhouse gases, where we now know and account for the fact that some are far more powerful than others. The Global Warming Potential of the various gases must be taken into account before a company can claim neutrality. Remediating a ton of carbon dioxide with a ton of SF6, which has more than 20,000 times the warming potential of CO2, is clearly inappropriate.
In the same way, all plastics are not created equal. We need to ask how large the particulate is, since small plastics can be eaten by fish, replacing actual food in their stomachs and reducing survival rates. We must ask whether the plastic is buried in a landfill or loose in a river system on its way to the open sea. And it matters greatly what the level of toxicity is.
The warming potential of SF6 against CO2. No one would call that exchange neutral. Plastic is still traded as though a ton is a ton.
Global Warming Potential · the analogy the standard was built on
Small pieces of plastic washed up on the beach. Photo by Daniel Aronson
On our voyage we found hundreds of pieces of microplastics loose in the open sea, just in our very small patch of ocean, along with larger fragments and complete forms. Among them, an intact toilet seat.
The elements of True Plastic Impact. Image: Valutus
Before the Resolute left the dock, my company had a working framework of no less than twelve metrics, including weight, that must be taken into account in a realistic plastic standard. In our metrics working group sessions at sea, we batted around a number more that may need to be accounted for, and we talked about implementation, data structures, and how to organize all the information we need.
Because of the time we were able to spend working, and the time available for small groups to talk, we collaborated far more closely and at length than any typical convention would allow. Soul Buffalo's formula for bringing potentially adversarial stakeholders together in an intimate, escape-proof space gave room for wide-ranging conversation and eliminated the echo-chamber effect that single-issue conferences can create.
We had perspectives in the room who believed plastics are good, they just need to be kept out of the oceans. We also had those who wanted to remove plastics from the world altogether. And we had them talking and working together on the problem. How cool is that?
In the end, the group agreed that a realistic standard for plastic impact is needed, one similar to carbon's Global Warming Potential. I agree, and I believe such a metric, which we call True Plastic Impact, would let companies target the most critical plastics, prevent them ever reaching a sensitive ecosystem or a waterway, and prioritize the most important ones to remove first.
For me personally, this was a chance to get in a room with many of those who can decide how plastics are going to be dealt with and make it stick. One day, one of the participants from a major multinational went to make a call. He returned later and announced, "Just talked to the CEO and he's on board."
That is the appropriate metaphor, of course, given that we were on a ship.
One year of plastic that washed up on a very small strip of Nonsuch Island beach. Photo by Daniel Aronson
A Bermuda beach visited during the Summit. Photo by Tom Gruber
It was bracing to see the scale of the problem, but also encouraging to see the scope of the response. By the time we docked four days later, I was part of a committed working group from the ship, one of more than a dozen such groups that sprang out of the voyage. And I had a deepened understanding of, and commitment to, grappling with and beating the ocean plastics problem.
Such is 21st century exploration.
The True Plastic Impact framework is still published at PlasticStandard.com. It was the most complete weighted measure anyone had put forward, and the industry did not adopt it. Plastic is still counted by the ton, which means a ton of film loose in a river still cancels a ton of rigid plastic buried in a landfill. The argument on this page has not been answered. It has been left alone.
Measured wrong, it counts as solved.