Prior to the presentation that Richard Brubaker, founder and managing director of Collective Responsibility in Shanghai, I felt incredibly apprehensive about my personal sustainability practices as well as the city’s changing policy regarding recycling. However, after he broke down the areas in which recycling worked and didn’t, I felt like my experience with the new recycling laws was validated. This past week, as I went to the trash/recycling bin with four categories, I was yelled at by an ayi for not properly sorting my food trash from my recyclables, and was even told “You probably don’t properly recycle in whichever country you come from” which was incredibly demoralizing. This made me hyper-aware of the actual strain of laws that promote sustainability. I enjoyed the talk thoroughly, because it wasn’t just a call to action, but an assessment of the informal recycling practices in place in Shanghai already. The takeaway from both the talk and this week’s readings is that failure to be sustainable isn’t a failure on the part of the individual, industry or government, but is a collective responsibility.
Chapter 1 of “Sustainability” by Kent E. Portney clearly breaks down the different schools or foundations of sustainability practices, which makes it much easier to understand the various ideologies that contribute to overall sustainability. The six foundations are as follows: ecological/carrying capacity, resource/environment, biosphere, critique of technology, no growth/slow growth, and ecodevelopment. I think that certain areas deserve more attention or action, especially critique of technology and ecodevelopment. Most of society has been doing their best at reducing their carbon footprint, but government and industry has to catch up and start changing their business models and passing regulations that align with a more ecological standpoint.
Chapter 3 of “Accumulation: The Material Politics of Plastic” – Made to be wasted: PET and topologies of disposability by Gay Hawkins – is a more in-depth look at the factors that contribute to PET pollution, which encompass history, social functions, and market. Hawkins emphasizes the fact that PET (namely PET bottles) were not always these single use, haphazardly disposable objects. As she says, “it is an instrument for capital accumulation” and was only mass produced and marketed to be used only once so that consumers would buy more frequently. The plastic bottle has a fairly ironic history of replacing more recyclable materials such as paper or glass. The irony lies in the fact that what was once a selling point for PET is now its greatest problem – durability and permanence. Once a wondrous invention, PET has become a huge environmental threat.
I conducted some of my own research on plastic pollution, and I learned about the different ways that plastic harms organic life, especially in the ocean. The size of the plastic object has an effect on the type of harm – macroplastics lead to physical entrapment (six-pack rings), while microplastics lead to ingestion (microbeads), and on a molecular level, toxic chemicals are released from plastics (pthalates). The last and least visible harm is perhaps the most insidious because of how little we are aware of the chemical effects that plastic has on both our ecosystem and our bodies. There are already campaigns or laws that ban macro- and micro- plastics (plastic bag ban, cosmetic microbead ban), but barely any regulations that protect us from pthalates or other chemicals that disrupt our endocrine and reproductive systems. The BPA scare is the only thing that people think of when they consider the chemical harms of plastic, but as Jeb Berrier made clear in “Bag It”, almost all of the products we use contain pthalates and could be hugely detrimental to our health. It’s incredibly daunting to think about plastic pollution let alone sustainablity as a whole, but categorizing them into different areas of thought and practice makes it an easier task.
wtf that ayi!!??