Timothy Birdnow

Here is an article that debunks claims about how plastics never degrade and are filling the oceans forever. It's well worth a read.

From the article:

I was reminded of this topic by a newspaper story with the unsurprising title: Unless something changes, there will be more plastic than fish in the oceans by 2050. While compelling, does this "fact” make sense? No more than the claim that plastics don’t degrade in seawater or that plastics take millennia to break down. What parent hasn’t given their child a plastic outdoor toy and found it sun-bleached and degraded after a single summer outside? The reality is that plastic decomposes in some conditions and doesn’t in others. I think we all agree that paper decomposes when exposed to sunlight and water and yet they found readable newspapers in landfills that were over 40 years old. That is because landfills are not designed to decompose waste, they are designed to store it indefinitely. You simply can’t use landfill results to judge the biodegradation rate of plastics.

The "fish fact” originated in a report titled "The New Plastics Economy — Rethinking the future of plastics” by the World Economic Forum, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and McKinsey & Company. Now here is a funny thing, the report doesn’t explain how they generate this claim in its formal text. Instead, they do so in an endnote. A warning: any time a report’s primary statistic comes from a calculation in an endnote you should take that fact with an extremely large dose of salt. Why? because someone clearly decided it was not reliable enough to go in the main text where it would be actively checked by peer-reviewers.

So let’s look at the endnote in question (number 22)

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 08:00 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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