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Banning Plastics Will Make The Planet Worse Off. Here’s Why

by Pierre Desrochers and Joanna Szurmak
July 01, 2021, 2:12 PM
in News and Opinion
Reading Time: 4 mins read
A A
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recycling plastic plantAccording to many environmentalists, coal, petroleum, and natural gas, together with the fuels, lubricants, and myriad other products these fossil fuels make possible, help drive widespread environmental problems.

As the journalist and activist Murray Dobbin put it a few years ago, the “ever-increasing production and use of fossil fuels will, over time, kill billions of us and irreversibly change all life on the planet.”

Taking its cue from the likes of Dobbin, the Trudeau government wants to designate all plastic manufactured items — not just straws! — as “toxic.” Surely such a bold move is justified in light of how terrible things have become for humans and their planet.

Yet, one has to wonder.

As many people have pointed out, plastic materials have many benefits. They’re versatile, cheap, lightweight, and resistant. They protect our food, reduce food waste and help produce a lot more food a lot more efficiently — and therefore more cheaply — than was possible a few decades ago.

And, crucially, plastic pollution is not a problem in advanced economies like ours as we’re pretty good at burning and recycling plastics, transforming them either into energy or other products.

Indeed, plastics and fossil fuels benefit both humanity and our environment. We are born and live surrounded by plastics and countless machines created with and powered by fossil fuels.

There are now nearly eight billion of us, with the vast majority of people living much longer and more prosperous lives than the one billion people who were around when coal use took off two centuries ago. Moreover, the richer we are, the greener most parts of the planet become.

More people, more industry, more food, more consumption, and a greener planet? How can this be? Easy. We’ve gotten better and better at substituting resources produced on the surface of the planet with resources dug or pumped from underground.

Before 1850, approximately three-quarters of all products used by human beings came from living plants or animals competing for resources on the Earth’s surface.

As Harvard geologist Kirtley Fletcher Mather observed in 1944: “Today only about 30 percent of the things used in industrialized countries come from things that grow; about 70 percent have their sources in mines and quarries.”

Indeed, refined petroleum products (fuels, lubricants), synthetic products (plastic, fiber, cloth, rubber, sweeteners, vitamins, medicines), metals, sand, clay, silicon, potash, and phosphate have gradually reduced the demand for: wild fauna such as whales (for whale oil, baleen, perfume base), birds (for feathers), elephants, polar bears, alligators, and other wild animals (for ivory, fur, and skin), trees and other plants (for lumber, firewood, charcoal, rubber, pulp, dyes, and green manure), agricultural products (for fats and fibers from livestock and crops, leather, dyes, and pesticides from plants), work animals such as horses, mules and oxen and the large quantities of food they consume and, finally, human labor in various forms (mainly agricultural work).

This large-scale substitution allowed our ancestors to, in the words of historical demographer E. A. Wrigley, “break free from photosynthesis” and become independent from the soil.

These advances, in turn, made marginal agricultural land, sometimes cultivated through environmentally damaging methods such as slash-and-burn, available for spontaneous reforestation, re-wilding, and tree plantations while sparing many non-cultivated marginal wetlands, grasslands, and forestlands from the plow.

In North America, Europe, and other parts of the world, there are more forested areas now than in the 1950s and even the 1850s.

Plastics are not perfect, but if handled properly they are better and greener than substitute products made of plants and animals. Turning our backs on plastic will make us and our planet worse off.

Read more at Financial Post

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Comments 7

  1. Brian James says:
    4 years ago

    Corporations who claim plastic is recyclable lied. Folks need to be aware of the corporate and government Ponzi scheme.

    Oct 4, 2018 Why your recyclables might have no place to go

    But China has shut its doors to plastic waste, which could result by 2030 in more than 100 million tons of trash with nowhere to go. So how did our recycling become so reliant on a country half a world away?

    https://youtu.be/UAwCK–pmZ0

    • Rhee says:
      4 years ago

      So how did our recycling become so reliant on a country half a world away?
      When it became apparent that recycling is a dirty menial task that requires a lot of literal hands on work, which is easier to foist upon 3rd world nations due to the same envirowhackos who oppose recycling plants in the western hemisphere whilst loudly declaring their love of recyclable packaging.
      Morons.

  2. Terry says:
    4 years ago

    Plastic is a miracle product. Today we have nothing to replace it and if it is banned in this country and others we will have to go back to what we used decades ago. This fact escapes the small minded thinking of Mr. Trudeau and others like the NDP and Green Party. The planet will be worse off without plastic.
    Recycling properly will prevent any damage our world.

  3. Gumnut says:
    4 years ago

    We never broke free of photosynthesis, we just tapped into ancient stored reserves of energy from it.

  4. Spurwing Plover says:
    4 years ago

    Banning Plastics based upon Junk Science and Politics Yes the Eco-Freaks are more nutty then a 250 Acre grove of Walnut Trees

    • ddwieland says:
      4 years ago

      You talkin’ ’bout my prime minster, Justin ‘Fancy Socks’ Trudeau? Right on!

  5. John Shewchuk says:
    4 years ago

    Democrats never intend to ban plastics or eliminate use of fossil fuels and here is why … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOpOnaRMGCY

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