How do we recycle?

I work in a very large Indian company that has operations in many parts of the world. I work for a company that is a part of this large group, and its operations are only a tiny part of the total operations of this enterprise. So when I look at the paper consumption of my relatively small company, that can run into many reams of paper in a day, I can only imagine how many hundreds of reams of paper will have been consumed in one day by the company's operatives in all parts of the world.

Now if this is one Indian conglomerate, there are dozens like this with revenues running into thousands of crores, so one can imagine how many reams of paper all these companies put together will be consuming in a day and when we realize that the world is full of such conglomerates with operations and activities in every corner of the world, I find I am unable to fathom the sheer amount of paper consumption of all these corporations. 

A few weeks ago, I asked the maintenance person what happens to all the waste paper that is generated on the floor. He didn't know where it ended up, and upon my question that did he know if all this paper went to recycling at all, he drew a blank. Another colleague of mine with who I raised this point mistook my intention, and assuming I was talking about the security of the discarded paper, as in, whether they were shredded to destroy their content.

These reactions ably demonstrate our own attitude towards trash. We throw something in the trash can, somebody comes and collects it, and that is the end of it. I think none of us has ever bothered to wonder what happens to the trash that is generated by us and by our surroundings. Most of us are too used to dumping all our waste together, so that our tea leaves mix with plastic, our banana peel mixes with our waste paper, and we turn in into a stinky cocktail of trash and put it out for somebody else to take care of it.

Indians are chronic litterers. For one, we can't seem to travel to any place without food. A calling sign of many Indian tourist families that travel without and outside the country is the need for food. Gujarati families are famous for carrying as many Gujarati packed food items as they can, and no matter where Indian tourists are - on a boat, on a train, on a sidewalk in Singapore, on the beach in Thailand, on a raft on the Ganges river - our favorite activity is eating. I say our favorite activity is eating because we do that consciously. Our second favorite activity of course, is littering, which most do almost as unconsciously as breathing. Every passing moment in Mumbai when I am on the local train or sitting at Marine Drive or riding in a taxi, the most common theme I see are people spitting and littering, and I sincerely believe that we all will be living on mountains of trash soon. The movie Wall-E may actually be a very true scenario many years down the line, because it is amply visible to me that the earth's capacity to take our crap, and scrap, is diminishing.

Of course, littering is only a small part of the overall increased consumption levels of the developed and the developing world. The first world had already adapted a lifestyle of gratuitous consumption and now the developing world is matching them trash per trash. Is it any wonder that our pristine seas are now slowly dying because of the decades of human and industrial trash that is being continuously dumped into them?

There is a formation called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch which is the world's largest landfill according to some, and sits smack in the middle of the Pacific Ocean! Very simply, the oceans are our dumping grounds, and have been forever. We know that there are ocean currents that flow in various directions across our oceans, and when a few currents meet each other at such angles that creates a sort of vortex in the middle, imagine a tiny tornado you see when the winds blow through building corners and lift light dust and trash into a tornado, they dump all the trash they are carrying with them into this vortex. Such a system is called a gyre involving large ocean currents.

So just like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, there is the Indian Ocean Garbage Patch, and just like them, there are three other great garbage patches floating on our oceans.

While there is visible debris and trash floating on the oceans, the problem with the garbage patches is that they are mainly plastic, and that too in a form that is broken down to very tiny levels, or as the article says, polymer level.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch has one of the highest levels known of plastic particulate suspended in the upper water column. As a result, it is one of several oceanic regions where researchers have studied the effects and impact of plastic photodegradation in the neustonic layer of water. Unlike debris, which biodegrades, the photodegraded plastic disintegrates into ever smaller pieces while remaining a polymer. This process continues down to the molecular level.

As the plastic flotsam photodegrades into smaller and smaller pieces, it concentrates in the upper water column. As it disintegrates, the plastic ultimately becomes small enough to be ingested by aquatic organisms that reside near the ocean's surface. Thus, plastic waste enters the food chain through its concentration in the neuston. Some plastics decompose within a year of entering the water, leaching potentially toxic chemicals such as bisphenol A, PCBs, and derivatives of polystyrene.

Who is to disprove what I say is a fact that the suspended polymers will definitely have originated from the tobacco satchets that millions of Indian men dump around them without thinking anything about it. This is just to illustrate that eventually, we will be polluting the entire world and then have to deal with the consequences. Most of the world's trash ends up in the water bodies, notwithstanding the large masses of landfills that we continue to fill.

I wanted to write about a relatively simpler process of recycling of paper, but its hard for me to not think about what's happening to our planet through our littering. I simply do not trust the human race to change its behavior, especially the consumers, and perhaps the only way out now is to develop a game changer, maybe something that can reduce plastic to organic waste or simply burn it into water vapour! 

Here are some facts from an article in the Telegraph, a British newspaper:

There are now 46,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre of the world's oceans, killing a million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals each year.

Invisible to satellites, poorly understood by scientists and perhaps twice the size of France, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not a solid mass, as is sometimes imagined, but a kind of marine soup whose main ingredient is floating plastic debris.

Fifty years ago nearly all that flotsam was biodegradable. These days it is 90 per cent plastic.

The world's navies and commercial shipping fleets make a significant contribution, he discovered, throwing some 639,000 plastic containers overboard every day, along with their other litter. But after a few more years of sampling ocean water in the gyre and near the mouths of Los Angeles streams, and comparing notes with scientists in Japan and Britain, Moore concluded that 80 per cent of marine plastic was initially discarded on land, and the United Nations Environmental Programme agrees.

The wind blows plastic rubbish out of littered streets and landfills, and lorries and trains on their way to landfills. It gets into rivers, streams and storm drains and then rides the tides and currents out to sea. Litter dropped by people at the beach is also a major source.

Plastic does not biodegrade; no microbe has yet evolved that can feed on it. But it does photodegrade. Prolonged exposure to sunlight causes polymer chains to break down into smaller and smaller pieces, a process accelerated by physical friction, such as being blown across a beach or rolled by waves. This accounts for most of the flecks and fragments in the enormous plastic soup at the becalmed heart of the Pacific, but Moore also found a fantastic profusion of uniformly shaped pellets about 2mm across.

Nearly all the plastic items in our lives begin as these little manufactured pellets of raw plastic resin, which are known in the industry as nurdles. More than 100 billion kilograms of them are shipped around the world every year, delivered to processing plants and then heated up, treated with other chemicals, stretched and moulded into our familiar products, containers and packaging.

During their loadings and unloadings, however, nurdles have a knack for spilling and escaping. They are light enough to become airborne in a good wind. They float wonderfully and can now be found in every ocean in the world, hence their new nickname: mermaids' tears.

Worldwide, according to the United Nations Environment Programme, plastic is killing a million seabirds a year, and 100,000 marine mammals and turtles. It kills by entanglement, most commonly in discarded synthetic fishing lines and nets. It kills by choking throats and gullets and clogging up digestive tracts, leading to fatal constipation. Bottle caps, pocket combs, cigarette lighters, tampon applicators, cottonbud shafts, toothbrushes, toys, syringes and plastic shopping bags are routinely found in the stomachs of dead seabirds and turtles.

A study of fulmar carcases that washed up on North Sea coastlines found that 95 per cent had plastic in their stomachs – an average of 45 pieces per bird.  

Plastic is bound to a human life in such a way that if we were to discard even a quarter of all the plastic products that we use, I believe we would not be able to survive! That's modernity for you. Unfortunately, so it is for the rest of the species on this planet as well, as we kill them slowly. I've reached this conclusion many times that we won't be able to turn back to living a life that is simpler, nature-friendly and simply less materialistic. Unfortunately, recycling is not very profitable, its not very profitable to produce electricity using the sun or the wind, there is no alternative to plastic, and nothing has been found, organic or chemical, that can burn down plastic, so I do not know what's going to happen, but if there is ever a change for the better on this planet, it will be only after we've managed to kill half the planet! I'm being a pessimist I know, but I do not see anything around me to make me believe otherwise. I'm a sinner myself, and I know how difficult it is to find alternatives to so many of the plastics I use daily. Working towards changing the world on that front is a failed exercise that will never succeed. The only solution now is to find something that will make all this plastic vanish!