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Commentary
Eco-warriors do not sleep or sleep in pursuit of universal sustainability. Plastic looms are growing on the list of enemies due to their non-biodegradability. Three years ago, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised that the government would phase out the production and use of difficult-to-recycle plastic products with the goal of eliminating plastic waste by 1930.
Therefore, on June 20, the Minister of the Environment Steven Guilbeault issued A comprehensive plan to ban harmful disposable plastics and keep them away from the environment will come into effect in December. List of prohibited plastic materials: Checkout bags. Cutlery; Food service wear; Ring carrier; Stir the stick. And, with a disability exemption, a flexible straw sold from behind the counter, clearly believing that my colleague John Robson is suffering. Observed“We will be too stupid to discover their existence, just like cigarettes.”
These measures will “put Canada among the world leaders in the fight against plastic pollution and help meet the commitments of the Marine Plastics Charter and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.” Do you say, the world leader in the fight against plastic pollution? Nonsense. This plan does nothing like that.
Indeed, despite decades of suffering from pollution and littering, Canadians are not as conscientious as we think.The Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup The 2019 project removed over 163,000 kilograms of plastic waste from Canada’s nearly 4,000 kilometers of coastline. Documented transportation included over 12,000 PET bottles, 12,480 plastic straws, and nearly 17,000 plastic bags. This nasty trash is aesthetically annoying. But the good news is that it’s relatively easy to clean up.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch On the other hand, it is a really serious problem in the North Pacific. Greenies convinces us that we Canadians are guilty of this environmental crime because our vast collection of marine debris comes from terrestrial sources. But in reality, the patch mainly consists of fishing nets and gear. Nets entangle and kill sea animals. There are no plastic bags or beer can rings, but most come from China and are thrown into the water. From a fishing boat.. 2017 study Nature Communications has concluded that 86% of the wreckage is “improperly managed plastic waste” from Asia, with Africa and South America accounting for almost all of the rest. Most of our plastic straws end up in the trash can. Prohibiting them is pure virtue signaling.
Canadians experiencing guilt about the use of plastics have taken the relief of moral absolutism in the well-annotated results of John Tierney’s work on this subject, distilled into the fascinating 2020 City Journal. You will find it. paper, “Reverse panic on plastic”. Tierney has become quite an expert in the field of human waste, and his investigative journalism in that field was, epidemiologically, a life-changing experience for me.
I had a traditional view, for example, on landfills for waste disposal. They are terrible for the environment, aren’t they? Then I read a featured article in The New York Times Magazine on June 30, 1996. This is a thorough counter-argument to the alleged benefits of recycling and the strong defenses of landfills.Recycling is garbage.. It’s just a bit of an exaggeration to compare the impact on me to Epiphany.
In it, Tierney argues that “recycling can be the most wasteful activity in modern America. It’s a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources.” Then he builds a pile of evidence to prove he is right. Readers learn that as far back as 1996, there was no reason to worry about toxic leaks from landfills. It’s always one of my concerns. We use soil to regularly monitor underground leaks. “
However, there is not enough space in the landfill. No. If a big city like New York can ship all food demand from farmland, why shouldn’t waste be shipped to land-rich and cheap places? Collected in one space, New York’s annual waste emissions will occupy a 20-story, 15-square-square block. It’s a daunting image. However, “By 3000, when Americans have been dumping garbage at current speeds for 1,000 years and all the garbage is dumped in 100-yard-deep landfills, by 3000, the country’s garbage piles will be 35 miles on each side. Fill the square land. “
From a point of view, this trash occupies only 5% of the area required for a national solar panel arrangement proposed by environmentalists, or one-tenth of the grazing land currently available for grazing in all the United States. It only occupies. In addition, as in previous landfills, all trash was grass-covered and melted into the country’s 150,000 square miles of green space.
Do you feel better anymore? Tierney says his work “set a record for harassment emails,” and I can believe it. Now, let’s go back to the plastic bag.
In fact, the plastic “disposable” bags that most people use many times are fine. They are Gotham-thin, but hold pounds of produce. They are cheap and energy efficient to manufacture, use very little water or other natural resources to manufacture, and can be easily shipped in large quantities. They occupy very little space in landfills and, unlike the decomposition of cotton and paper bags, do not emit methane or other greenhouse gases. A small amount of carbon extracted from the natural gas used to make them can be safely isolated in modern landfills. You can put 12 plastic shopping bags in the space occupied by one paper bag. According to Tierney, cotton bags need to be reused 173 times to offset carbon dioxide emissions during manufacturing. However, totes are usually used only about 15 times.
Coincidentally, with the foresight, Tierney’s plastic article was published before the pandemic, stating that if you want to be environmentally friendly, you need to order groceries online. Several trips to the supermarket will undermine a year’s worth of plastic bag stripping, given the energy used by your car, not to mention washing those bacterial tote bags.
Plastic bags can be a terrible wrap, but plastics are not always harmless to the environment. In the UK, 11 billion wet wipes, including plastic, are used each year. “Fatberg”The first is the “two tennis court sizes” of the London sewer system. Hmm! Now there is a ban that I am willing to support.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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Barbara Kay is a columnist and writer. Her latest writing project is co-authored with Linda Blade in the book “Unsporting: How Trans Activism and Science Denialis Destroying Sport”.
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