Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for November 10, 2005

Degradable Plastic Bags: Don’t pass the Turtle Test

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Since speaking today with a turtle expert at the local environment protection agency and reading summaries of their autopsy reports I have become more attached to my green bags.

After posting Why Ban the Plastic Bag , a reader of this web-log sent me a long and interesting report titled ‘The Impact of Degradable Plastic Bags in Australia’ published in September 2003 by Melbourne University RMIT, Download file (983 kbs).

I had not realized that there are already a whole range of degradable plastic bags in use and that a significant issue is that they don’t disintegrate as soon as they are thrown away. It seems they are more water proof and freezer safe than degradable.

The Queensland Government’s Environment Protection Agency with Flinders University in South Australia and Seaworld on the Gold Coast were testing the longevity of biodegradable fishing bait bags (pg 61).

The RMIT report indicated that while the research was ongoing, there was already agreement, including with the recreational fishing industry, for the new bait bags at $8.70/kg to be phased in over a two year period and the non-degradable conventional polyethylene bags at $1.50/kg be phased out. Concern that too many plastic bait bags end up in the ocean, and sea turtles eat them believing them to be jellyfish, and die, was driving the move to degradable bags.

The report made reference to the work of Colin Limpus, a turtle expert at the Queensland Environment Protection Agency. According to the report Limpus believed biodegradable plastic bags were a step in the right direction but since they still take six months to degrade in seawater, they are not a complete solution. Limpus was concerned that because the thermoplastic starch is modified to reduce its sensitivity to moisture, that this may prevent digestive enzymes breaking them down, but he accepted that at least in theory, the bags should be digestable and perhaps even nutritious for turtles.

In 2003 Limpus was trying to organize a project to study the breakdown time of biodegradable plastics in the digestive tract of turtles. However, since sea turtles are threatened species he was proposing to use herbivorous fresh water turtles, which are not threatened, in a plastic feeding trial.

I phoned Limpus today to find out where the research was up to.

He indicated that based on the work of a University Honour’s student (being written up) he nolonger supported biodegradable bait bags. He said that the turtles can’t digest them, they may work in landfill, but they are a threat to wildlife.

I asked about plastic bags as a cause of death relative to other threats. Limpus said that autopsy work gave a indication of cause of death and that the relative contribution of plastic bags is available in the environment protection agency’s annual reports at
http://www.epa.qld.gov.au/nature_conservation/wildlife/caring_for_wildlife/marine_strandings . I had a quick look at some of these reports this afternoon and note that in the reports for marine turtles, causes of death include “intestine obstructed with plastic” including bait bags.

Limpus said that turtles ate partially disintegrated plastic from Chinese takeaway containers and icecream containers. He said these types of plastic containers, along with boat strike, were a bigger threat to most of our marine turtles than plastic bags.

Limpus indicated that degradable and non-degradable plastic bags were a particular threat to Leatherback turtles, an endangered oceanic species.

Ten of 33 dead leatherbacks washed ashore between 1979 and 1988 had ingested plastic bags, plastic sheets or monofilament according to this international website http://www.turtles.org/leatherd.htm.

Australia Fudging to Meet Kyoto Targets

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SimonC has just posted a comment at The Cost of Kyoto stating:

I think the anti-Kyoto people are the ones who are scare mongering with their cries of ‘we’ll all be ruined’. …According to Howard we’ll meet our Kyoto targets (despite not ratifying it). So why hasn’t Australia fallen into economic free fall?

I understood that the reason Australia is going to meet its Kyoto targets (even though it hasn’t signed up to Kyoto) is because the Australian government has done a fiddle with the tree clearing figures particularly in Queensland.

Indeed, the Federal government report, Tracking the Kyoto Target 2004, published late last year indicated Australia was on target. But what the Minister did not acknowledge was this was mostly a consequence of restricting and redefining ‘tree clearing’.

The report says vegetation management legislation recently introduced into Queensland and NSW will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 24.4 million tonnes. By comparison, the energy sector increased emissions by 85 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent during the period 1990 to 2002.

The total reduction attributed to ‘land use change’, which includes reduced tree clearing, is 78 million tonnes for the same period. So the increase in emissions from the energy sector has been offset by clearing fewer trees – at tremendous cost to individual landholders in Queensland and New South Wales, yet the Minister made no mention of this.

This is how it works:

What is known as the “Australia Clause” (Article 3.7) in the Kyoto Protocol allows countries for which land use change and forestry was a net source of emissions in 1990 to include the emissions from land use change in their 1990 baseline.

It has been claimed that the Australian national greenhouse office consequently exaggerated the extent of the clearing in 1990 to give an inflated baseline value and at the same time not recorded carbon sinks resulting from forest growth and woodland thickening.

This made it easier to achieve the Kyoto target for 2008-2012.

Ecologist, Bill Burrows, writing in the journal Global Change Biology in 2002 explained how Australia’s often quoted total net greenhouse gas emissions would be reduced by 25 per cent if we included the sinks resulting from woodland thickening in our National Greenhouse Gas Inventory.

But this would also affect our 1990 baseline and make it harder for the ‘accountants’ to suggest we are on target, and even more difficult to justify the vegetation management laws.

Burrows calculates the annual carbon sink in about 60 million hectares of grazed woodland in Queensland alone is about 35 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year.

So we have a Federal Government pretending to meet its obligations to an agreement it hasn’t signed up to using accounting practices that deny the phenomenon of vegetation thickening.

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Some months ago Bill Burrows sent me a copy of a speech he gave earlier this year, Download file. It is a detailed critic of the recent politics of vegetation thickening in Queensland from the persepective of a retired government scientist.

Phoenix Environmentalism

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Brad Allenby, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Arizona State University, suggests in an essay at Earthvision website that ideologically driven environmentalism is failing, that there is a need for a new environmentalism which he terms ‘phoenix environmentalism’. Allenby writes that:

“Phoenix environmentalism rejects Edenic teleologies and static utopianism and accepts complex adaptive systems as preferable models of our current reality. This is a difficult step, for it cuts strongly against powerful existing emotions. It means accepting that humans will continue to impact evolutionary biodiversity, while creating designed biodiversity in companies and laboratories; that the world’s ecosystems will change profoundly as a result of human activity; that more technology, not less, will characterize the world.”

Read the full essay:

As readers will recall from their training in the classics (or Harry Potter), the phoenix is a bird that burns in old age, to be reborn from its ashes. Regarding environmentalism, a recent poll sponsored by Duke University speaks to the burning and old age: only 10% of those polled identified the environment as one of their top concerns, compared to 34% listing the economy and jobs. This would not be remarkable if we were in a recession, but it is quite significant given that the economy has been growing for a couple of years. Moreover, 79% claimed they favored stronger environmental standards, but only 22% said that environmental issues have played a major role in their recent voting. Judging by the almost total lack of environmental discussion in the last presidential election, even that 22% number is a gross overstatement of voter interest.

These numbers are in a sense simply validation of a trend that has been apparent for at least ten years. Classic, ideological environmentalism, born of the 1960’s, is not just in trouble; as the Nietzschean “The Death of Environmentalism” notes, it is deceased as a viable mainstream public policy discourse. With notable exceptions, the environmental community has not adjusted to this reality, instead huddling in an ever shrinking self-selected band of true believers waiting for the rest of the world to recover its senses and return to the alter. This can be seen in the unchanging negativity of the rhetoric of most environmental organizations; in the tendency to cling to the Kyoto Treaty as if it were the only talisman capable of granting safe passage to the future; in continued efforts to halt rather than appropriately shape powerful technological waves such as genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

Thus, it is not surprising that to some the poll data represented “a clear disconnect” (the quote is from William Reilly, former U.S. EPA head). But in reality it does not. For most Americans, environmental issues have always been only one good among many, and in general as the most obvious environmental problems have been addressed, they have switched their priorities to other good they also value, such as jobs. For classic environmentalists, on the other hand, the environment is a transcendent value, and thus cannot be balanced away in such a risk/benefit calculus. The disconnect, therefore, is an artifact, and an indicator, of an environmentalism whose age has passed.

But there is a phoenix at work here, and an important one. It has several characteristics. For one, it is more systemic than the environmentalism it grows from, and displaces; whether reified as “environmental justice” or “sustainable development,” it integrates social, cultural, and economic factors as well as just environmental ones. For another, it rejects environmentalism as a dominant discourse in favor of understanding, and creating tools and methods for introducing, environmental dimensions into other human activities, especially management and design of institutions, products, and services. It also tends towards pragmatism, taking the position that it is better to accomplish what can be done within the world as it is, rather than insisting on an Edenic world that can never be.

But perhaps most fundamentally, phoenix environmentalism rejects Edenic teleologies and static utopianism and accepts complex adaptive systems as preferable models of our current reality. This is a difficult step, for it cuts strongly against powerful existing emotions. It means accepting that humans will continue to impact evolutionary biodiversity, while creating designed biodiversity in companies and laboratories; that the world’s ecosystems will change profoundly as a result of human activity; that more technology, not less, will characterize the world. It means accepting accelerating change in all human systems, which, in an age that scientists have already entitled “”the Anthropocene,” or the Age of Man, includes most “natural” systems as well. Indeed, the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, material flows of all kinds, the biosphere, oceanic and atmospheric systems — these are increasingly shaped by human design and human culture, and to deny this is simply to blink reality. In such a period of rapid technological, cultural, and economic evolution, ossified mental models based on unthinking attachment to past patterns will inevitably fail.

The solution is not to deny ethical responsibility for outcomes, or to retreat to irrelevancy, no matter how romantic. Rather, the challenge is to develop a phoenix environmentalism that enables us to ride turbulent waves of change while guiding them as best as possible to be ethical, rational, and responsible.

It reminds me of the piece by Steward Brand titled Environmental Heresis, click here.

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Thanks to detribe for sending me the Earthvision link.