Waste — animals make it, and we make it too. It’s not new, it’s been around for millennia, and it shows no sign of ceasing to exist. We have also managed waste for a very long time. The earliest known wastewater management system was built over 6000 years BC. Burying and burning waste are reliable, low-technology options, and we have developed new methods since then.
It turns out that it’s not the amount of waste that we create that matters most, but what we do with it. When it’s managed responsibly, all is well. However, mismanagement of waste creates problems. It tends to be unsightly and smelly, and it can even lead to serious health consequences.
We have been told that plastic waste is seriously harming the oceans, but is that assertion supported by scientific studies?
As one might expect, we find that regions with more wealth and larger populations create far more waste. However, wealthier countries have waste management systems, with bins, collection, recycling, incineration, landfills, and so on. This means that they are not the ones responsible for waste entering the oceans. Why then do the NGOs tell those in the wealthy countries to feel guilty about this issue when it is not actually their waste that causes the most impact?
L. J. J. Meijer et al., More than 1000 rivers account for 80% of global riverine plastic emissions into the ocean, Science Advances, 7, 2021
You can probably guess the answer to that — NGOs tell the wealthier people that they should feel guilty so that they open their wallets and donate to those very same NGOs. The strategy works very well indeed and has made such NGOs hugely wealthy. However, rather than using the money to help, as the donors intended, the NGOs rarely spend any of their money to actually help our environment. Instead, they use it on lobbying and marketing campaigns to attract even more money and increase their influence.
Pollution & Litter
The term “plastic pollution” is commonplace in the media; even plastic manufacturers use the term. However, scientists have studied that topic too, and they came to a surprising conclusion. They traced the origins of the so-called “pollution” and found out that it was actually “litter.” It turns out that litter dropped in one location and later found elsewhere is perceived as “pollution” when it is really just litter that has moved, for example, due to the current in a river or the wind blowing.
“The environmental problem of litter, particularly regarding plastics, is in one sense a local problem that stems from discard behaviors…”
“Correspondingly, we argue that an effective way to reduce the impacts of plastics and other types of litter on aquatic systems is to identify management strategies that can be employed on local scales to reduce inputs.”
E. Carpenter & S. Wolverton, Plastic litter in streams: The behavioral archaeology of a pervasive environmental problem, Applied Geography, 84, pp. 93–101, 2017
Carpenter and Wolverton’s findings are important because solving the problem of litter requires a different approach than addressing pollution. Solutions for litter that work are education, deposits (to encourage collection), and fines.
People react strongly when they find out that it’s not “pollution” caused by companies, but rather litter caused by human litterers. They say, “How can you blame the people? You are just pointing the finger elsewhere to avoid the blame being placed on the plastic industry.” — Or words to that effect.
Just as when a parent or a judge decides who is right, the key parameter is evidence. Every party wants to blame someone else, but what does the evidence say? We have plenty of studies on litter, and they show people drop it intentionally. A study where they observed and recorded thousands of littering events came to this conclusion.
“When combined, an estimated 81% of observed littering occurred with intent.”
You read that correctly — over 80% of littering is intentional, so it is simply wrong to blame the material, the manufacturer, or the litter itself. Yet, that is what is happening. Situational variables can explain only 15% of the behaviour (such as no bins or existing litter); the rest comes down to the person.
“The results of the current research indicate that 15% of general littering acts result from contextual variables, and 85% result from personal qualities.”
P. W. Schultz et al., Littering in Context: Personal and Environmental Predictors of Littering Behavior, Environment and Behavior, 45 (1), pp. 35–59, 2011
Some may say that litter only occurs because there are not enough bins. Studies do indeed show that providing waste receptacles reduces litter, but there is still significant litter, even with waste bins being just 20 feet, that’s just 8 steps apart. This is yet more convincing proof that people litter and then look for ways to place the blame elsewhere.
“Further inspection of the data showed that aggregated observed general littering rates were low (and relatively flat at 12%) for receptacles less than 20 feet away. The littering rates increased linearly between 21 and 60 feet and then remained relatively flat at 30% for receptacles 61 feet away and beyond.”
Cigarette butts are the most littered item of all. A study found that around 75% were littered and most were not even extinguished, creating a fire risk. That was in an area with an average of 3.5 bins (trash cans) in sight. There is no doubt that this disgraceful behaviour is an intentional, personal choice by the litterers.
V. Patel et al., Cigarette butt littering in city streets: a new methodology for studying and results, Tobacco Control, 22, pp. 59–62, 2013
Even with the evidence being crystal clear, there are plenty of allegations of “pollution” where the intent is to blame plastics and companies for the actions of these people we call litterers.
Shannon Osaka, Washington Post, March 24th 2024
And the report from Break Free From Plastic states:
“The analysis reveals that this year’s top global plastic polluters are The Coca-Cola Company, Nestlé, Unilever, PepsiCo, Mondelēz International, Mars, Inc., Procter & Gamble, Danone, Altria, and British American Tobacco.”
Break Free From Plastics Brand Audit Report 2023
Brand Audit 2023 Report
Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and many others have repeated this outrageous and false claim. Why? Presumably, because it brings them attention and more donations. Does it matter to them that it is untrue? It would appear not.
Here is what the judge had to say about a similar case against Pepsi (New York v. PepsiCo Inc. et al., New York State Supreme Court, Erie County, No. 814682/2023):
“But the judge ruled it would run ‘contrary to every norm of established jurisprudence’ to punish PepsiCo, because it was people, not the company, who ignored laws prohibiting littering.”
Jonathan Stempel, PepsiCo beats New York state’s lawsuit over plastics pollution, Reuters, November 1st 2024
The judge also cited precedent that gun manufacturers are not responsible when the gun owner decides to pull the trigger and cause harm. Again, people are responsible, not the company that sold them the product.
Interestingly, I posed this question to my own children’s class at the local elementary school. After all, I wrote The Plastics Paradox because their teachers had taught my daughters misinformation, so I made sure to go there to teach both the class and the teachers about the evidence. Anyway, I showed the kids a cartoon of a guy who had crashed his car into a tree and asked who was to blame. Should we blame the car, the tree, or the person? Even 8-year-olds got the answer right, so it amazes me that adults struggle to place blame correctly on the person and not the object or the manufacturer. Try buying a Ford car, driving it into a tree on purpose, then arguing to the judge that it was the car’s fault or even Ford’s. See how convinced the judge is.
Science and the legal system agree that littering is caused by people, but there is another, even more powerful way to prove it. There are 8 billion plastic banknotes printed every year — that’s one made for every person on the planet every year for decades. However, I have yet to see one on the floor when I go for a walk, or floating in a stream, or deposited on the beach. I often joke that it would be wonderful to go to the beach on holiday and just sit back as the plastic banknotes come rolling in from the ocean. The longer the holiday, the richer I would get!
Why aren’t those billions of pieces of plastic littered? Because they have value. That’s right — as soon as an object has value, we stop littering it. That’s proof that littering is a choice we make, not an accident. It is also the reason deposit systems for cans and bottles work so well. People don’t like dropping items with monetary value. The same applies to credit cards. There are billions of those too; they are made of plastic, and we manage not to drop them.
“We find that a nation-wide DRS can increase PET bottle recycling rates from 24% to 82%, supplying approximately 2700 kt of recycled PET annually. With stability in demand, we estimate that this PET bottle recycling system can achieve 65% bottle-to-bottle circularity, at a net cost of 360 USD/tonne of PET recycled. We also discuss environmental impacts, stakeholder implications, producer responsibility, and complimentary policies toward an efficient and effective recycling system.”
R. Basuhi et al., Evaluating strategies to increase PET bottle recycling in the United States, Journal of Industrial Ecology, 28, pp. 916–927, 2024
Not only did the study show that deposits are effective, but it also demonstrated just how effective they are across various geographical locations and deposit sizes.
We know definitively that litter is caused by people and that effective solutions include deposits, education, and fines. This study found that fines do work.
“The findings support our hypothesis indicating that littering is more frequent and common when the private cost to littering is not internalised as opposed to when there is a penalty for littering.”
F. Salim Khawaja & A. Shah, Determinants of Littering: An Experimental Analysis, The Pakistan Development Review, 52 (2), pp. 157–168, 2013
Blaming materials or companies for litter is unjust, unwise, and counterproductive, but so-called “environmental groups” do it anyway because their greed surpasses any concern they may have once had for the environment. They should be sued, but instead, they are suing innocent companies for litter that was dropped by their customers.
“Legal actions against major corporations escalated in 2023, with lawsuits filed against Danone, Coca-Cola, and Nestlé in Europe. Brand audit data is instrumental in providing evidence for legal battles, underscoring the role of these audits in holding corporations accountable.”
https://www.breakfreefromplastic.org/2024/02/07/bffp-movement-unveils-2023-global-brand-audit-results/
Before we move on, it seems like the right time to clear up some other common misconceptions about litter. On social media, people often demand more recycling of plastic as a solution to litter, aka “pollution,” but there is no link between the two. People drop litter intentionally, as we have seen, and there is no evidence that they change their behaviour because of local recycling rates.
Another common belief is that plastic litter is only a problem because the plastic is not degrading quickly enough. People literally drop litter and then have the audacity to blame that litter for not vanishing, like they expect a wizard to wave a wand and clean up their mess for them. This misguided thought is responsible for all the buzz around degradable plastics and other degradable materials.
However, there are serious errors with this line of thinking. Firstly, a paper bag weighs 60 g compared to a plastic bag that weighs just 6 g. So, banning plastic bags and changing to paper means a tenfold increase in the weight of litter. This is an extreme case, but as we saw earlier, replacing plastic means 3–4 times more material, and therefore, a much greater mass of litter.
Secondly, degradation means the conversion of solids into carbon dioxide, which is exactly what most people are against.
Plus, people want degradable materials because they believe that normal polyethylene bags do not degrade. NGOs, including the World Wildlife Fund, tell us that it takes hundreds of years for a plastic bag to degrade. However, they tell us that without a shred of evidence, and it turns out to be just another internet myth spread by NGOs for their own nefarious purposes. As we shall see in a later chapter, it is factually incorrect to say that plastics do not degrade. In fact, they do degrade and far more rapidly than people realise.
Thirdly, studies show that when you replace plastic with a material that the public believes to be degradable, they drop much more litter. A study compared PET bottles to paper-based drink cartons.
“As was expected, the PET bottles were littered less than the Cartocans. Of the PET bottles, 2.6% was littered, while 5.8% of the Cartocans was littered…”
“In addition to this, 16 of the peel-off closures of the Cartocan were found littered, while none of the caps of the PET bottle were found separately.”
R. Wever et al., Influence of Packaging Design on Littering and Waste Behaviour, Packaging Technology and Science, 23, pp. 239–252, 2010
Recently, companies have been touting their new tethered caps, which are attached to the PET bottle to prevent littering in the same way that “idiot mittens” work (mittens tied together with a string through the arms of the jacket to prevent us from losing them). It appears that such tethering may be of limited utility.
For some reason, people are especially interested in beach litter. Perhaps because beaches are so beautiful and litter is so jarring against a pretty background. Whatever the reason, scientists have also studied beach litter.
For popular beaches, they found that litter does not come from the oceans, as some believe, but mainly from the people on the beach. Apparently, people litter until the beach is ugly, then go find a new clean beach to ruin. That is human behaviour, and the solution lies in altering that bad behaviour through education, deposits, and fines.
“Beach users have been shown to be main contributors to debris along coastal and estuarine shores. The ease of access to a beach is a main factor to the number of beach visitors.”
K. Willis et al., Differentiating littering, urban runoff and marine transport as sources of marine debris in coastal & estuarine environments, Nature Scientific Reports, 7, 44479, 2017
“The beaches with lower levels of urbanization also had smaller quantities of anthropogenic litter. Items related to beach users were predominant for most of the beaches. The confirmation that beach users are primarily responsible for the generation of anthropogenic litter may contribute to the development of strategies to reduce the problem, such as installing bins and distribution containers for anthropogenic litter collection and designing educational campaigns for beach users.”
M. C. B. Araújo et al., Anthropogenic Litter on Beaches With Different Levels of Development and Use: A Snapshot of a Coast in Pernambuco (Brazil), Frontiers in Marine Science, 5 (233), 2008
The study in Brazil found many wooden sticks on the beach. I visited São Paulo to give a keynote, and my friend Evandro explained that those sticks are used to eat cheese. This uniquely local type of litter helps scientists to prove that it was caused by the people on the beach and not washed up from elsewhere.
One recurring response from people when talking about litter is an offer for me to fly to Malaysia, Indonesia, Hawaii, or the Philippines and see that I’m wrong. That response is especially illogical and counterproductive. Firstly, no one claimed that litter doesn’t exist. In places where people drop a lot of litter, we find a lot of litter. The people there cause it, and the solution is behavioural change. The second reason that the suggestion is crazy is that the impact of flying to see litter has the same greenhouse gas impact as 10,000–20,000 PET bottles, which is more bottles than I will use in my entire lifetime.
People seem to think that flying around or sailing to see environmental degradation is noble and justifiable, but it is neither. Certain rich CEOs do it, and I’m sure it makes them feel and look good, but there is no scientific reason to do it because we already have the studies and decades of data available on our laptops with no travel needed. It’s ironic that people’s reaction is to do what’s worse for the environment, which is flying around to look at it.
What about beaches without people on them? Remote beaches also face some contamination, but the amount of litter is far lower and is mainly composed of improperly discarded fishing gear, including nets washed up on the tide.
Some remote beaches still have large quantities of consumer items. How can that be when there are no people there to drop litter? Scientists have investigated that too, and by examining the litter in detail then doing some detective work, they discovered the culprits are fishing vessels throwing trash overboard.
“Many oceanic islands suffer high levels of stranded debris, particularly those near subtropical gyres where floating debris accumulates. During the last 3 decades, plastic drink bottles have shown the fastest growth rate of all debris types on remote Inaccessible Island. During the 1980s, most bottles drifted to the island from South America, carried 3,000 km by the west wind drift. Currently, 75% of bottles are from Asia, with most from China. The recent manufacture dates indicate that few bottles could have drifted from Asia, and presumably are dumped from ships, in contravention of International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships regulations. Our results question the widely held assumption that most plastic debris at sea comes from land-based sources.”
P. G. Ryan et al., Rapid increase in Asian bottles in the South Atlantic Ocean indicates major debris inputs from ships, Environmental Sciences, 116 (42), pp. 20892–20897, 2019
Summary
In the previous chapter, we saw that plastic is less than 1% of both materials waste and total waste by weight or volume. So, for waste, a focus on plastics cannot deliver meaningful results. Scientists have argued that focusing on less than 1% of waste distracts from addressing more than 99% of waste, where we could make a real difference. Replacing plastics with alternatives creates 3–4 times more waste, so that would not be a positive move. Instead, we should make choices that reduce impact based on the data.
In this chapter, we have seen that although countries with greater wealth and higher populations generate more waste, that waste is, for the most part, properly managed. Other countries have not yet caught up, and those that dump their waste on land and into rivers are generating a disproportionately large and negative impact, especially for our oceans. The solutions are known and working in many countries, so we need to help them catch up. Sometimes, I hear the argument that those countries do not have the technology to manage their waste. However, we have been managing waste for millennia, e.g. by burying or burning it — technology is not the obstacle.
Scientists have determined that the term plastic “pollution” is inaccurate; what people consider pollution is really “litter” that has moved and accumulated in other places, such as rivers or oceans. So, while NGOs and even plastic manufacturers mistakenly talk of “pollution,” a problem associated with industry, the actual culprit is litter. This revelation has important consequences because the correct solution depends on accurately diagnosing the problem. The discovery that litter is the issue allows us to implement proven solutions, such as deposits, education, and fines. Singapore is super clean because of severe fines, whereas Japan is clean due to their culture, which takes a strong stance against litter.
Once more, we have seen how NGOs have misled us by blaming plastics and companies when science and the courts agree that litter is caused by people. Now, we need to make sure that the public and our policymakers recognise the truth so that appropriate policy can follow.
We know bans will not solve the litter crisis. There is no evidence that a litterer will choose to drop a PET bottle but not drop a metal can. We know such people will misbehave no matter what material is used, and alternative materials lead to increased amounts of litter, not less.
Extended producer responsibility (EPR) has been suggested as a solution, but we know that is not the answer either. Firstly, because it is not the producer who drops the litter, nor is it their responsibility to pick it up. Secondly, we have already paid taxes for litter cans, cleanup, and disposal. EPR systems would force us to pay twice for the same service — once in our taxes and a second time in increased prices because the manufacturers will certainly pass the cost of EPR to consumers.
Lastly, let us remember why people litter plastic more than some other materials. It is because it is so inexpensive. The lower the cost, the more tempting it is to litter. The answer is not to move to alternatives that both cost more and increase impact, but rather we should stay with our cheapest, greenest option and encourage people to act responsibly.
The current prevailing attitude is just the opposite. We are being told to limit production and access to our cheapest, greenest option. That may be fine for wealthy people, but what does it mean for the poor? They cannot afford more expensive options. They buy food by the sachet because one sachet is all they can afford. Wealthy people telling others what to do is unjust and counterproductive. People should be free to make personal choices but not to inflict their ideologies on others.