The Plastic Soup Trip

That's why Kyle and his team went on a 21-day-boattrip to Midway Island to clean it up in 2013. For people who don't know: This island is literally in the middle of nowhere. To get there from Oahu is 2100 kilometers. To remove plastic soup from this area you need a big boat, experienced free divers and muscles. "We do free diving because of the danger of entanglement. When you are cutting up a net under water, the ropes can get everywhere."

The fishing nets are dangerous a danger for the inhabitants."The animals are curious by nature and start playing in the nets. We find a lot of animals being entangled." The area is home of the endangered monk seal and green sea turtle (honu in Hawaiian), the reason why the work of NOAA is so important. "If we don't help them, no one will."

So what did they find way out there? When Kyle showed me the numbers, my jaw dropped. Some examples:

44 individual net clusters

30,492 hard plastic fragments

5705 oyster aquaculture spacers

4781 bottle caps

2214 beverage bottles

980 toothbrushes and personal care items

886 slippers

Total weight: 13795 kilograms of plastic marine debris. In the middle of nowhere. More information about NOAA here. All pictures are property of NOAA.

Three bins to rule them all The San Francisco government provided their citizens with a very easy system: three bins for all your trash:

The green bin is for all the compostables: plants, food scraps and soiled paper

The blue bin is for recyclables: bottles, cans, plastics (packaging), clean paper

The black bin: all the rest

Besides that they have a place where you can hand in toxics, big items electronics and clothing. Recology is the company that collects all the waste and they recycle it at different sites in the Bay Area. This is in short how to hope to achieve zero waste.

Green  The green bin and the whole composting program is a big success in the Bay Area. 600.000 tons of compostables are collected every year. By collecting all the food, from citizens and restaurants, plants and soiled paper, Recology creates high grade soil. The soil is so good the wineries in California want it to grow their grapes. There is a lot of protein in the soil and the grapes tend to like it. Blue This is where the magic happens. Paper, cans and plastic are mixed together, but Recology has a way of separating all the different materials. Won't get in to detail, but by using different separation techniques like sorting by density or using a simple magnet, they can separate the paper, steel & aluminum and plastics.

Black Everything in the black bin goes to a landfill. San Francisco does not "thermally recycle" (burn) their garbage, like a lot of countries in Europe do. Robert Reed from Recology was really clear on that: "Burning is bad." I will dive into this topic in another blogpost. Now 470.000 tons of garbage still end up in landfills. Recycling or... selling? "So okey, they still use landfills, but they recycle right?" Well, kinda. The recycled plastics are either mixed together so they become  a black type of plastic used in park-benches or they are sold to China for roughly $ 75,-. What they do with it? They don't know.

This was a bit of a bummer, because I expected something spectacular. I expected high quality recycling, all the plastics in different containers, but this doesn't sound like it. There is a good reason why high quality recycling doesn't happen according to Reed: "We use so many different kinds of plastics in our products and containers, it's too hard for us to separate everything." 

Make it less complex The environmental department acknowledges this problem. Take a soda bottle: The cap, the bottle and the wrap are all different plastics. Upcoming in San Francisco is the Tetrapak-packaging: a sandwich of plastic-paper-aluminum used for all kinds of drinks. Impossible to separate, let alone recycle. The techniques to recycle different materials are there and improving, but the growing market of different materials makes it hard to do good. So what to do?