Poets justify banning of single-use plastics

Vincent J. Curtis

9 Oct 20

RE: ban on plastic grocery bags long overdue.  People's Daily editorial of this date.

Whenever poetry majors write about scientific matters, the results are usually tragic - but amusing.  Unable to marshal complex reasoning, they quickly descend into moral argument.  Dogmatically asserting they are moral, counterarguments must be the work of the devil.

So it is with the long overdue ban on plastic bags.  This was supposed to happen earlier this year, then the pandemic broke out.  The superior hygiene of plastic over re-usable cloth bags became so important that banning plastic had to wait.  In an admission that the pandemic is over, the ban is now back on.

What are the reasons for banning these plastics?  Being hard to re-cycle, they end up in “the environment.”  Greenpeace says this isn’t enough.  Canadians need to break their “addiction” to plastic.  This one is laughable: plastics originate as fossil fuels and contribute to climate change.  Then, when incinerated, they pollute the air we breathe (a double whammy!).  A doozey: They contaminate the soil that grows the food we eat. (Hint: soil doesn’t grow food, farmers do, and they don’t sow their land with plastic.)  Finally, Canadians toss away 3 million tons of the stuff every year.

I’d expect this level of work from a grade sixer.

Hamilton used to produce 12 million tons of steel a year, and even accounting for differences in density, that’s a bigger volume of steel that entered “the environment” than plastic thrown away today.

Canada has more than enough space to landfill all our municipal waste.  You can recycle these plastics if you need to by burning them.  The energy of combustion can generate electricity, and the carbon and hydrogen in the plastic get returned to the atmosphere whence they originated, to be recycled as plant food, again.

The banning of plastics is the federal government attacking Alberta’s major industry to the favor on Ontario’s paper mills.  (They cut down trees to make paper, you understand.) And another attack on restaurants that can’t use insulating Styrofoam for take-out orders.

Environmentalists are once again caught between their fallacies and their obsessions, and can’t reason their way out of a paper, or a plastic, bag.

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