Technical thinking: The problem is not plastics, but us

By Mark Jones

I was relieved at Acadia National Park when I didn’t see the plastic trash I was expecting. It was the same in Anguilla. I expected fouled beaches I never found. It was the same in Florida. Sadly, I found the plastic trash where I wasn’t expecting it: Kentucky.

Cave Run Lake, in the Daniel Boone National Forest, is the result of a dam on the Licking River. The lake is nestled in the hills where hollows form fingers into the lake. We went to Bangor boat ramp, nestled in one of those hollows, far from the dam, to kayak. The wooded hillsides rise rapidly from the water. We were deep in the woods. No houses. Just forest. Trash was everywhere.

A strange mix of trash collected on the shore. A football, a basketball, a soccer ball (pink, no less), and a blue playground ball could easily have been lost during play. The lake is a popular recreation venue. Most of the rest made no sense. There were tires, many tires, some on rims, most not. A refrigerator door and a CRT TV with a built-in VCR weren’t immediately discernable. Soda bottles, water bottles, and milk jugs were all common. So were containers for oil, coolant, ag chemicals, hydraulic fluids — large and frequently colored, making them easy to see.

The trash was so overwhelming, I made a trip to the ranger station seeking an explanation. I was hoping that an event — failure of a landfill, a flood, something acute — had recently discharged a slug of trash into the lake. Rangers confirmed some of my observations. Wide swings in lake level push trash onto the shore, where it sticks in the undergrowth, making it more visible. Trash is strewn up and down the steep banks. The construction of the spillway also tends to keep floating trash in the lake. No floods or failures were to blame, I was told, just poor management in upstream communities and by users of the lake.

The sheer quantity of trash makes me question the solutions being engineered to deal with environmental plastic. I question whether technical solutions, things like design for recycling or use of biodegradable polymers could solve what saw. I’m left feeling the issue is not the polymers, it is us.

Notably absent around the lake were recycling containers. Kentucky ranks 40th in recycling among the states. We schlepped our cans and bottles back to Michigan, conditioned to feel it is wrong just to throw them away. Michigan, in the terms of behavioral economists, nudges recycling. Michigan is one of the states with a bottle bill. Much of what we brought back was worth a dime, a little nudge, but enough to ensure our cans and bottles would be correctly managed.

By most accounts, only 9% of recyclable plastic is recycled globally. Bottle bills remain unpopular in spite of evidence they drive recycling and reduce trash. Only 10 states require deposits on cans and bottles. Those states are responsible for 61% of the PET bottles recycled and 51% of all aluminum cans and glass bottles recycled. Michigan’s return rate is trending downward, now at only 75% rather than the near complete return rate of previous years. One of the reasons cited is lack of inflation adjustment. The dime deposit at inception of the program in 1976 would be 55 cents today. It has never been adjusted.

Cave Run Lake flows to the Licking River, to the Ohio River, to the Mississippi River and ultimately to the ocean. Excessive trash on the shore serves as a reminder microplastics in the ocean come from us. It isn’t a problem out there, it is a problem here. Technical solutions may make incremental improvements, but real improvements require social change. Poor management of waste in our backyards is the problem — and we must engineer the solution.