"There is no "away" – A study on how to move towards a circular plastics economy", er en artikkelserie skrevet av Vilma Havas i SALT. Vilma har siden 2019 jobbet med et doktorgradsprosjekt der hun studerer den nåværende, lineære plastøkonomien, og hvordan den kan utvikles til å bli mer bærekraftig og sirkulær. I denne artikkelserien gir hun et innblikk i sitt arbeid gjennom å dele noen av sine funn og erfaringer.
In countries like Norway, where I live, the environmental impacts caused by plastic waste can feel distant. The waste management systems are relatively efficient, which is why the vast amounts of plastic waste we produce disappear from sight as soon as we’ve disposed of it.
This isn’t the case in Indonesia. Poor waste management systems combined with lack of awareness have driven the country to a state where military force is required to clean up the environment – more specifically the infamous Citarum river, which is one of the most polluted rivers in the world. I got a chance to visit the banks of this river in November 2018, during a marine litter study trip to Indonesia, arranged by Innovation Norway.
Seeing the river banks paved with plastic waste was overwhelming – even though I had seen images of these types of extremely polluted rivers before and knew therefore what to expect.
For decades, we have been treating plastics as close to worthless materials which can be disposed of after a brief single use. At the same time, we’ve been able to increase hygiene in hospitals and reduce the carbon footprint of road transport thanks to plastics. So plastics aren’t all bad, they just need to be used in applications where their features, e.g. light weight and durability, are beneficial to the society and the environment. In other words, we need to redesign the whole plastics economy, if we want to make a lasting, positive change. Currently, the plastics economy is more or less linear, as only a fraction of the plastics produced are recycled into new materials. In addition, the production and use of plastics is constantly increasing, which intensifies the negative impacts caused by the linear system.
The day we visited Citarum, the water was low, and the banks were full of plastic trash. We could find everything from food wrappers to used diapers and plastic bags spread on the ground. Usually, the river banks are also occupied by scavengers; locals who make a living out of picking plastic and selling it to recycling companies. However, on this day the banks were empty as «there was no plastic to be picked», as our local guide explained to us. The scavengers are namely only interested in the clean, robust plastics that have a value on the recycling market, rather than the contaminated, soft and mixed plastics which are worthless.