(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Climate Strike -- Plastic (week 31) [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-07-20 You can make a difference to the hurt being caused by climate chaos and the great extinction event, in your town or your city! How? Reuse, repurpose, and recycle this information. This is the letter for week 31 of a weekly climate strike that went on for 4 years in front of San Francisco City Hall, beginning early March 2019. For more context, see this story. For an annotated table of contents to see topics for all the strike letters, see this story. STRIKE FOR THE PLANET because nothing digests plastic but everything is eating it. That’s why this week’s topic is PLASTIC. What are plastics? Plastic is the general name for long chain organic polymers composed of thousands of linked monomers. Plastics are differentiated by the inclusion of various chemicals to create desired properties, overwhelmingly nonpolar, and lipophilic. For a chem-to-English translation of the above paragraph: A molecule is a unit of atoms bonded together. A monomer is a molecule that can hook up to other monomers like snap beads can be hooked together to make a necklace or a bead curtain; a long chain of joined monomers is called a polymer. Organic, in chemistry, simply means including carbon; it doesn’t mean anything inherently better for the planet. Plastics are manufactured synthetic polymers. Inclusions are other chemicals that are jammed into or hooked on to or hitch a ride on the polymer. Nonpolar means not charged, and that means not soluble in water. Lipophilic means it does dissolve in and plays with fats, oils, lipids, and non-polar solvents. So why are plastics a problem? Plastics are new (19071) and incredibly stable compounds (50-600 years to degrade2). New means nothing has yet evolved to eat them. Stable means they don’t break down chemically. And that means they don’t decay. At all. Many of the inclusions in plastics are also problems (ex: Bisphenol A), and these inclusions are often “proprietary” information, meaning we can’t find out what we’re being exposed to (ex: lead, phthalates, antibacterials, etc3). Many are toxic. Lipophilic means all the oil-based nasties out there (DDT, for example) are attracted to plastic and bond with it.4 Some plastics look like food, and that and the size of microplastics means that there are substantial amounts of plastic in our air, in the dust, in our water, and in the food web.5, 6 Humans are eating about 5g of plastic a week, or one credit card.7 Other species are ingesting more. And that also means we and the rest of the food web are eating the stuff included in the plastic and the stuff attracted to and absorbed by the plastic afterwards, often very toxic.8 What actions must SF take regarding plastics? We have to eliminate plastic as much as possible as fast as possible. This means: Cigarette butts. The filters are plastic and toxic. A usage fee to pay for mitigating the environmental damage caused by the filters is a good way to start. The usage fee should be large – the damage these filters cause is large. Single use plastics need to be priced out of SF. Again, a mitigation fee that increases exponentially over 10 years would be effective and have the least amount of impact on poor communities and communities of color. Begin with plastics #4 and #6. Stop plastic-coating (aka astroturfing) our parks and playgrounds, and place a hefty fee on the usage of artificial “turf” by private entities, at least enough to mitigate the environmental costs of production, elimination, and exposure. Get SF’s hospitals off plastics where possible and on to less toxic plastics where not. 9, 10 Eliminate single use psychology entirely. The idea was good for specific capitalists but it’s fatal to the biosphere. Make SF a leader in plastic replacement and the non-single use movement. We can no longer afford for anything to be single use. And we can no longer afford plastic. What’s the timeline for action? We are still increasing the amount of plastic being produced and dumped into the ocean. SF has substantially increased the amount of plastic being imported into the city in the last decade. The current extinction crisis says we must act now or we lose forever. We have to aim to eliminate 90% of all plastics in SF in ten years, though we have to start acting faster than that on multiple issues to avoid the worst outcomes headed our way. 61 weeks left.11 FOOTNOTES 1. For bakelite, the first fully synthetic plastic. 2. Claire Le Guern. “When The Mermaids Cry: The Great Plastic Tide”. Santa Aguila Foundation. September 2019. http://plastic-pollution.org 3. Beth Terry. Plastic Free . Skyhorse Publishing. New York. 2012. 2015. Pg. 45-46. 4. Carl Safina and Jesica Perelman. “Pesky plastic: The true harm of microplastics in the oceans”. National Geographic. 4 April 2016. https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2016/04/04/pesky-plastic-the-true-harm-of-microplastics-in-the-oceans/ 5. Katie Valentine. “Zooplankton Are Eating Plastic, And That’s Bad News For Ocean Life”. ThinkProgress. 14 July 2015. https://thinkprogress.org/zooplankton-are-eating-plastic-and-thats-bad-news-for-ocean-life-dbe31be8ae2b/ 6. Doyle Rice. “Oh, yuck! You’re eating about a credit card’s worth of plastic every week”. USA Today. 12 June 2019. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/12/plastic-youre-eating-credit-cards-worth-plastic-each-week/1437150001/ 7. Robin Shreeves. “How much plastic do you consume every day?” Mother Nature Network. 6 June 2019. https://www.mnn.com/food/healthy-eating/blogs/how-much-plastic-do-you-consume-every-day 8. “Toxicity Of Plastics”. Blastic, and the European Union. https://www.blastic.eu/knowledge-bank/impacts/toxicity-plastics/ 9. Alyssa Danigelis. “Plastic Packaging Hospital Waste Recycling Initiative Kicks Off in the US”. Environment + Energy Leader. 16 March 2018. https://www.environmentalleader.com/2018/03/hospital-waste-recycling/ 10. Wendy Glauser, Jeremy Petch, and Sachin Pendharkar. “Are disposable hospital supplies trashing the envirionment?” healthydebate. 18 August 2016. https://healthydebate.ca/2016/08/topic/hospital-medical-waste [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/20/2180184/-Climate-Strike-Plastic-week-31 Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/