Climate Thoughts with Brian

‘You will swallow 285 pieces of plastic today. You will do it again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next.’

‘Total Garbage’ by Edward Humes opens with shocking facts about the level of plastic pollution that we have in our world today. He helpfully visualises the extent of the plastic that we are ingesting and says, ‘Think of it as pulling a credit card out of your wallet, chewing it and swallowing it. All of it. Up to once a week, every week. Forever.’ An image and action that we would not do willingly and yet, we are now aware of the levels of plastic pollution and waste, but are we doing enough to reduce this impact?

This is a thorough and extensive text that goes some way to help make the invisible, visible. Sometimes it can be hard to notice the everyday items that are wasteful and this, Humes argues, is a created phenomenon.. A lack of awareness, at times a wilful blindness over personal convenience, or has it been a carefully crafted advertising narrative that is built upon the extension of the continued capitalist practice of waste? ‘Wastefulness is driven by choice, habit and marketing, rather than by necessity, inevitability, and economic sense. We are neither helpless nor hopeless to act.’

The amount of waste that has become integral to our lives is chronicled in a variety of societal areas, from energy consumption, to plastic pollution, to transport, to house design to indoor cooking methods. Time and time again, Humes challenges us to start at the end of the process rather than the start and ask ourselves, if we knew fully about the dangers of a behaviour, would we be willing to undertake that risk?

Our disposable age

Humes uses the phrase and label, ‘Our disposable age’. A phrase that ‘says it all: the branding of waste not as a problem but as a way of life’. The use of single use plastic is seized upon by Humes as his opening example of how pervasive waste is in our world. He acknowledges that, ‘Unlike metal, wood, clay, and glass, plastic does not occur in nature. It is a 100 percent human-made thing,’ He then outlines the level of excessive use of plastic and the amount that could be recycled, were it not for  deliberate ‘consumer confusion’ from a range of ‘recyclable’ labels. ‘And we Americans use about 54 billion disposable “paper” cups a year’. Our consumer choices continue in our homes and in the amount of ‘single use’ plastic containers that lurk in bathrooms and kitchens from shampoos, hand washes, conditioners, toothpastes, mouthwashes, dishwasher detergents and cleaning products.  As a public, we can see these objects, but their true impact appears invisible.We are urged by Humes to think about what happens to a container once the contents have been used and how energy efficient this action might be. 

‘Thinking about what will happen to a product or package at the end of its useful life before you buy is key.’ 

We might happily ‘recycle’, feeling a sense of righteousness and high morality at doing so, but ignoring all the other aspects of the waste hierarchy and just focusing on the end action, will never help solve the underlying issue. Trying to reduce waste from the Great Garbage Patch for example, is an effective action in itself, but it would be better to ensure that the waste and plastic doesn’t arrive there in the first place.

Producer responsibility

Humes makes the powerful argument that businesses and companies should shoulder the responsibility for their product and increase the energy usage of their product. ‘Businesses must accept responsibility not only for the creation of their disposable plastic products but for their death as well’. He terms this ‘extended producer responsibility’ and argues that this could be a shift to turbocharge the narrative of waste. Many international companies simply aren’t there yet. By 2030, Coca-Cola’s plastic waste alone in the oceans is expected to reach 602m kilograms. There are many fears over human health risks posed by the spread of microplastic pollution and marine life doesn’t stand a chance against this level of waste being dumped unceremoniously out at sea. Coca-Cola also has reduced its recycled packaging targets from 50% down to only 35-40% by 2035, continuing its pollution over the next decade.

Industry has long tried to shift the responsibility and accountability for waste onto the end consumer rather than business. The ‘Crying Indian’ advertising campaign, carefully omitting any brand packaging, with its slogan, ‘People start pollution, people can stop it’ became the ‘single most effective piece of greenwashing in history’ according to Humes, and helped create a narrative and ideology of burden shifting.

‘Taxpayers were to blame for the problem, and that individual action, not producer responsibility laws, provided the only solution.’

Lifestyle ‘choices’

Humes then begins to examine in depth a range of other so-called lifestyle ‘choices’ and argues that with government intervention and a top down approach, the burden of reducing waste would not land with the individual and therefore meaningful change could happen.

He details the level of energy waste in housing designs and identifies ‘Passive Houses’ as being more efficient- ‘A Passive House uses up to 90 percent less energy than a conventional home for heating and cooling, and 70 percent less energy overall.’

This, therefore, raises the question- if this type of house design is both economically and energy efficient, why isn’t every new home a ‘Passive House’?

Humes tries to challenge us to disentangle ourselves from the emotional bonds of two more wasteful areas- that of car usage and that of indoor gas stove cooking. For both these two emotional issues, Humes argues that our relationships are artificial ones, which have been carefully curated by the automobile industry and the food industry to give us ‘freedom’ and therefore, we emotionally respond when this is challenged. ‘We need to rethink what a car is and what we should pay for it. And we don’t need to wait for car companies to tell us what we need or want. We can tell them.’

Statistical information is given about the amount of road traffic deaths and the economic burden of owning and using a car.  ‘The economic costs of vehicle air pollution in America, both toxic and heat-trapping, are estimated to be $180 billion a year.

Humes acknowledges that ‘cars are inescapable’ to the American identity, but points out that this wasn’t always the case, but has simply become the accepted ‘norm’.

‘But we’ve made them too central to our lives. Cars aren’t freedom. They aren’t irreplaceable. They are way too expensive. They are tools- just like bikes are tools.’ Having a rethink about how much you use your car, what your average journey is and more importantly why your city hasn’t been designed around sustainable, energy efficient transport options, leads to the conclusion, that it is in someone’s interest for as many people as possible to drive energy inefficient cars, which cause significant road traffic deaths globally. There are examples given in ‘Total Garbage’ of towns and cities, primarily in the USA, which have undergone a transport revolution and have made the sustainable switch successfully. Why can’t this be rolled out and who is fighting against this roll out?

With indoor gas stoves, Humes directs the reader to think about the premise in reverse. Would you willingly have in your family home a product which could increase the risk of your family developing health issues? ‘Besides the heat-trapping pollutants methane and carbon dioxide, stoves emit poisonous carbon monoxide, particulate pollution, asthma-triggering nitrogen oxides and the carcinogens formaldehyde and benzene.’ Humes continues to support his argument rationally by drawing on research, ‘Children living in a home with a gas stove have a 42 percent greater risk of developing asthma symptoms, according to a groundbreaking study in 2013.’ Cooking with induction stoves is proposed by Humes and food experts in the book as a way of reducing energy, household costs and also reducing health impacts. Breaking formed habits which can be dangerous for us, just seems sensible in the long term. ‘For better and sometimes for worse, we have a long history of replacing billion-dollar industries and entire ways of life with astonishing speed when it suits us.’

How to bring about change

Throughout ‘Total Garbage’, Humes gives multiple examples of how consumers and individuals can take action in their daily lives and feel empowered, whether this is with the clothes they wear and use, or their relationship to food and food waste. The aim is not to try and change everything at once and feel overwhelmed by the amount of either physical waste, economic waste, or energy waste that is your figure now. 

Understanding that this has been brought about by a system that has encouraged you to have a ‘disposable’ lifestyle and planned obsolescence especially in tech gadgets, doesn’t benefit the world, but the companies’ profit margins, can help you mobilise communities to be less wasteful. Neighbourhood garbage cleans of local parks, trash collections, planting community fruit and vegetable allotments can all encourage others to feel that change is possible. A bottom up approach can drive change from councils, cities and governments. ‘Change comes in two ways. It can be driven from the top down…Polluters should pay, not taxpayers is the theme here…Fortunately, change is also driven from the ground up, home by home, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, and community by community.’

Deciding how to act and where to act, as well as the motivation to act can seem overwhelming. Compare this to going to the gym, or starting a new diet and you can see that old habits can be powerful. We have a choice- to allow our societies to be wasteful, or to understand that through action, we can be the ones who turn up, who inspire and motivate others, who change the narrative to a new story- it does not have to be this way. Our future does not have to be like our past, We are the agents of the future. We can choose to be better ancestors.

‘Putting a stop to our wasteful ways will not immediately undo the damage our waste has already done- the plastic ocean, the toxic chemicals, the climate-disrupting pollutants. That will take generations, and those in the future will not thank us for taking so long to act.’

‘Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it’

– James Baldwin