Between 8 million and 11 million tons of plastic waste enter the ocean each year, according to the National Academy of Sciences, the equivalent of one garbage-truck-load per minute. Tough luck for marine life.

One-third of that is single-use plastics, “which humans interact with for seconds or minutes before discarding,” Main writes. About 95% of plastic packaging is disposed of after one use.

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The world has a huge plastics problem. And the first thing we should do about it is to trash all plastics recycling programs.

Plastics can be dandy items. And if they were used only where they were essential, rather than just where they are useful and cheap, their damage to the health of the world and its people might be tolerable.

Head over to the hardware store and you’ll find small tools, saw blades and tubes of glue encased in plastic so tough that you’ll need a sharp utility knife to cut through them. Utility knives also come encased in hard plastic.

Plastics recycling programs have been in full swing for at least a generation, but we can’t seem to recycle more than about nine per cent of consumer plastics. That figure might be optimistic — some peg it at closer to 5 per cent — and it isn’t growing much, if at all, as the years go by.

Just consider a trip to the grocery store, where all of your meat and fish and many of your fruits and vegetables increasingly come in hard plastic packaging, covered in multiple layers of softer plastic wrap.

We see the little triangle on the plastic container, we put it in the blue box, we watch the big trucks pick it up at the curb and we get the feeling that plastics are being recycled and aren’t instead doing tremendous harm to the environment.

It accounted for five per cent of global carbon emissions and 12 per cent of oil demand. Those numbers are likely to grow, because plastic production is expected to at least double by 2050.

Consider those shining decades of the 70s and 80s that so many of us are nostalgic for (except, in the case of the 80s, music-lovers): how many plastic items did we happily do without?

But I’m sure the committee’s reluctance offered little hope to the Break Free From Plastic movement, people who travelled to Ottawa from communities affected by plastic manufacturing, to share their experiences with air and water pollution.

Sounds crazy, I know. And it would be crazy, if we were actually recycling plastics. But we’re not. Or not enough of them, unless you’re content to dump more than 90 per cent into the seas and air, onto the land and even into your vital organs.

According to a Toronto Star article by Kevin Jiang on April 18, researchers have discovered that microplastics, tiny bits less than five millimetres long found in our food and water, can reach our most sensitive organs, including the brain.

Sadly, the committee seems determined to ignore the simplest and most obvious way to reduce the impact of plastic waste: to reduce the amount of plastic humans consume.

That crucial need to recycle, not to mention the huge quantities of used plastic available, haven’t sparked the invention of very many commercially viable uses for recycled plastics.

Perhaps we should establish one of those years, in which people managed to lead comfortable lives with very little plastic, as a baseline. Then we should judge whether each plastic item produced since then is really worth it or could be done without.

About 19 per cent of the plastic ever produced has been incinerated, a double whammy for both the quality and temperature of the planet’s air.

Some of the components of our high-microfibre diets are shed by plastic items. But just to make certain we and the fish we eat are absorbing our weekly credit card, manufacturers deliberately add microbeads to soaps, shampoos, toothpastes and over-the-counter drugs.

As of 2020, humans have created about 11 billion metric tons of plastic, more than the biomass of all terrestrial and marine animals.

There were signs during Earth Week, April 21-28, that our plastics problem has been recognized. An Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution, created a couple of years ago by United Nations resolution, held its fourth session in Ottawa.

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To contact Tom Mills, or to acquire a copy of his book Sex is a Four-Letter Word and Other Misconceptions, email him at hathcharm@gmail.com or visit humourmetom.ca.

Others are less obvious, such as the 100 billion items of clothing manufactured every year, about 70 per cent plastic, according to the Clean Clothes Campaign.

As the late comedian and philosopher George Carlin pointed out, the world likely will survive the plastics tsunami, but, “pack your s – – –  folks, we’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam.”

That concept met with “strong objections of plastic-producing countries and companies and oil and gas exporters,” who are pushing the wishful thinking of “circularity” instead.

Most of us are familiar with the back-end costs of all the plastic we’re using. But consider the front-end environmental costs of plastics, which are made from fossil fuels and require energy to produce.

What plastics recycling has excelled at is to relieve us of our guilt about using so many plastics, by presenting the illusion that they are being recycled.

Plastics recycling has ‘excelled’ at relieving our ‘guilt’ about using so many plastics, by presenting the illusion they are being recycled

And we should factor environmental consequences into the evaluation: for example, the fact that composite decking might last longer than wood shouldn’t necessarily make it acceptable, because it also lasts a hell of a lot longer in the dump.

I’m a little dubious of the study’s finding that humans ingest five grams of microplastics per week, “the equivalent of a credit card,” according to lead author Dr. Marcus Garcia.

The metabolic changes wrought by those plastic invaders may be associated with chronic diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular issues.

According to a report cited in The Guardian this month, plastic creation generated as much planet-heating pollution in 2019 as 600 coal-fired power plants.

Sure, it’s wonderful to have a lustrous head of hair, though I seem to remember women could have great hair before shampoos included microplastic beads. But it’s time to decide if such trivial perks are worth their disastrous environmental price.

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