‘Plastics are not the problem’

Recently my husband and I dropped by a fast-food place and ordered a take-out breakfast. The pancakes came in a carton box lined with wax, and the hot chocolate came in a paper cup. The sausage sandwich was wrapped in wax paper, and all our purchases placed in a brown paper bag.

I must confess I felt virtuous—and smug—upon leaving the outlet. A ban on plastics was recently imposed in our city, and it warmed our hearts that commercial establishments followed the law with little fuss. Earlier, we had bought some items in a giant department store and our purchases were wrapped in paper, although we had to lug the packages in our arms since we didn’t have a plastic bag with a handle.

Bans on plastic wrappers and containers have been spreading quickly among local governments of late. The logic seems unassailable. There’s been a crisis in solid waste management, with many municipalities closing down their landfills due to the complaints of residents about the stench and the potential hazards to health. Their backs against the wall, local governments have been seeking to reduce the amount of waste they have to deal with. Plastics have come under scrutiny because they are not biodegradable and presumably make up a big part of the household and commercial waste produced by communities. Plastic bags, especially the very thin “palengke” or market bags, are also major suspects in floods, clogging drains and serving as visible, colorful reminders of calamities.

And so the bans on plastics, which the proponents hope would reduce the amount of waste since paper and other materials are expected to degrade eventually, and clear drains, sewers, culverts and other outlets for flood water.

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But if you ask plastics manufacturers and marketers, particularly the Philippine Plastics Industry Association Inc. (PPIA), the ban on plastic wrappers and containers is short-sighted and impractical, no matter that it is motivated by good intentions and concern for the environment.

For starters, said PPIA officers Peter Quintana and Crispian Lao, those waxed cartons used for food would take just as long to degrade as a Styrofoam container. “You need to separate the wax lining from the cardboard,” they pointed out, adding that even plain paper does not degrade all that easily or quickly “since paper bags have also been found intact in decades-old landfills.”

Besides, paper does not make for a particularly safe or sanitary container for food. One bread establishment in Muntinlupa (one of the first local government units to impose a plastics ban) had been closed down for continuing to use plastic bags to wrap its loaves. “But they were eventually allowed to reopen after they showed that plastic made for a more sanitary wrapping for bread,” said Lao.

A ban on plastics may be politically convenient, but it doesn’t make much practical sense, Lao and Quintana said.

The solution to the problem of proper waste management is proper disposal (in waste bins for collection and not in the street where it could fall into drains), waste segregation and collection, and recycling, they said.

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Disposal, segregation and collection are the purview of households (separate your trash into “nabubulok” and “hindi nabubulok” (biodegradable or “wet,” and nonbiodegradable or “dry”) and local governments. But recycling demands the cooperation of households, neighborhoods, LGUs and the plastics industry.

Whenever I heard the term “recycling of plastics,” what came to mind were small community workshops where poor residents (usually women) were employed to weave bags, purses and other items from used plastic containers. But in the lunch with the PPIA folk, I found out that recycling on an industrial scale has been ongoing for quite a while.

Plastics, it turns out, may not be biodegradable (although there are efforts to hasten their degrading period) but they are eminently recyclable. Polystyrene is “versatile and cost-effective” because even used containers can be melted and broken down into pellets and reformed into new containers, said Quintana and Lao.

In fact, the Department of Science and Technology has partnered with the plastics industry in developing “melting ovens” that facilitate the recycling process. At the same time, the association has partnered with waste recovery firms, communities and schools, with trash collectors, community members and students deployed to collect and clean plastic containers (including PET bottles), which are then bought by recycling centers.

The price for a kilo of PET bottles, for instance, is P40 a kilo.

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“It is not the material, but the behavior that is the problem,” states an industry newsletter.

Consumers need to be reminded about minimizing their consumption of goods (buy shampoo, for example, in one big bottle rather than in dozens of sachets), and taking care to segregate their garbage. They can set aside plastic containers and bags for sale to recyclers, although the industry reps request that these be washed at least.

Aside from using the recycled plastic into more containers, some recycled materials have also been used to make other items like pipes, culverts, pails and even tables and chairs. Right now, plastic pellets are being mixed with cement to make building blocks and even road pavers, so that even our streets will soon be partly plastic.

So even with a plastic ban in place, we cannot relax our guard. We still need to be conscientious about our consuming habits and our way of disposing trash, and go out of our way to recycle garbage. The work never stops.