Plastic, Pachyderms and Profit

The critically endangered Hawksbill turtle
(Source: Aquaimages, Wikimedia Commons)

Plastic, Pachyderms* and Profit 
In Search of Solutions for a Sustainable Future


Posted by Matthew Edward Scarborough and Lina Scarborough

Before the advent of rifle-armed hunters, the African continent was home to tens of millions of elephants. By 1920 however, there are estimated to have been less than two hundred of them left in all of South Africa. Fast-forward to today, when there are once more thriving (though increasingly poached) populations of thousands of elephants. What saved elephants from extinction? A growing concern for the environment? The creation of national parks? Yes … but not only. There is also a more unexpected reason for elephants doing much better today: Materials Science.

A century ago, ivory was used in all manner of household objects: piano keys, combs, chess-pieces, bracelets, buttons and billiard-balls. Billiard-balls in particular were one of the main causes and largest culprits for the decline in elephant populations: in Sri Lanka in particular, elephant populations were decimated in order to produce the much sought-after billiard-balls. Fashionable as ivory was, it soon became apparent that demand well exceeded supply. In 1907 however, a scientist developed a substance named Bakelite: a hard, durable, ivory-like plastic which can now be found in many everyday objects. But since then plastics have also become ubiquitous -- we use them daily to the point that escaping plastic feels impossible.

This is where you fit into the challenge.

Today no one would dream of shooting an elephant to make a piano keyboard -- and it was ironically plastic that helped save the elephant. It is now high time we changed our behaviour once again, as plastic itself becomes a threat to the environment and its flora and fauna.

But is plastic really so bad?

Speak to our friend Talitha Noble, who works at the Two Oceans Aquarium in Cape Town. She is a marine biologist who spends most days rehabilitating turtles stranded on our South African beaches -- loggerhead and leatherback, green, the petite olive ridley and hawksbill turtles, all of which wash up on our shores in a poor state. It is not uncommon to find plastics (especially micro-plastics) being passed from their digestive systems.

Although Talitha is a dispassionate scientist, it’s hard not to develop an attachment to individual turtles. One turtle in particular – called Bob, arrived at the aquarium in a poor condition. He wasn’t eating or diving, tragically developed meningitis, brain damage, and even went partially blind. After being in rehabilitation for several months he passed a lot of plastic, including the remains of bags and a balloon. When he passed the plastic, it was a turning-point in his recovery. Bob is now a poster-child for plastic awareness, but there are countless other turtles: a large loggerhead called Noci even had a piece of plastic in his tummy which had travelled all the way from China.

The convenience of plastic, unfortunately, often trumps values. Those tools of convenience bear the flip-side of potentially being tools of mass destruction, fuelled by brand and consumer apathy. We can’t wait for the eventual launch of the next big materials invention. Act now by using the available alternatives.

For example, re-usable and handy mesh bags are easily bought online, or from modern eco-friendly shops. It doesn’t take much effort to purchase and keep one’s own re-usable cloth bags in the car, in comparison to the process it takes to make plastic, and then deal with its catastrophic consequences.

Plastics are derived from either crude oil or natural gasses which, geologically-speaking, took millions of years of form. We consumers in contrast typically use said plastic for the relatively short time taken from the grocery shop to our homes, before throwing the plastic packets and styrofoam boxes away for good.

But being thrown out is far from the end of your plastic. Plastic on the tops of landfills are often carried far away by the wind. If it doesn’t end up wafting up and down your street or in the stomach of an animal, it’ll evntually go into the ground, even if it is recycled (recycling can only be done so many times before the recycled plastic too needs to be discarded). Trillions of tiny pieces of plastic (so-called micro-plastics) now fill our oceans and have infiltrated our food-chains, causing massive (if largely unseen) ecological damage. So the best way to curb single-use plastic pollution is therefore to reduce your personal plastic consumption in the first place.

Yet all the research in the world might not be powerful enough to change our collective consumer psyche. It’s up to us individuals to put pressure on shops to adapt to the modern reality of wasted resources. It’s up to the shops to do their role to respond and offer initiatives and awareness. Together this mess was created, and together it must be fixed.

Consumers -- we must take the initiative and buy or make our own grocery bags for fruit and nuts, and cut the styrofoam out once and for all. I try to encourage the shopper next to me in line to do the same. Brand owners and supermarkets -- why not put up placards creating awareness so that consumers start bringing their own re-usable bags for loose fruits and nuts? Add a small surcharge on offering single-use plastics – as much as 50 cents often sways consumers, as it registers with them that there is a cost involved. If the costs are out of sight (such as the dead or injured marine animals somewhere out there), then it’s also out of mind.

All the knowledge in the world might not be powerful enough to change the consumer psyche. When all has been said, art and poetry may help to convey a sense of the bigger picture. In the poem A World Without Plastic, Stephen Katona writes:

It would be fantastic,
If we stopped using plastic,
And eased the world's pain,
With a healthy food chain.
Turtles would no longer gag,
On a supermarket's bag.

We can choose change from today with things wrapped the right way:


Rethink the bag – ban the balloon – and bring your own bakkie#. Together we can have a sustainable future with much less plastic (and happy turtles!).

---

Notes

*Pronounced patchi-derms: A large mammal with thick skin, especially an elephant, rhinoceros, or hippopotamus. 

#A South Africanism for an ice-cream box or similar re-usable container. 

And a bit about the authors:  

Matthew is a Zoology PhD student at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, where he researches the evolution of extinct elephants and mammoths. Lina Scarborough (formerly Ufimtseva) is a project manager at a German language agency in Cape Town with an interest in linguistics and ecology (Lina and Matthew got married in June this year).