So many things to write about

Every day the constant barrage of news stories offers me a host of topics worth writing about.  My first choice for this month was to focus on the appalling level of gun violence in this country and the many efforts that are valiantly trying to reduce it.

A raft of other troubling topics keep me up at night.

But I’ve decided to go in another direction.  I want to focus on a more hopeful topic:  Success combatting the longstanding problem of plastic pollution.

I’ve written about plastic pollution before.  Years ago I asked “What shall we do about plastic bags?” https://susanjustwrites.com/2014/04/30/.  I lamented the horrific pollution those bags have created and highlighted a Nigerian artist who uses them in her artwork.

I later focused on the crusade against the use of plastic straws. https://susanjustwrites.com/2017/08/

But the problem of plastic pollution goes way beyond plastic bags and straws.  It’s now recognized as a global problem.  According to the NRDC, negotiations aimed at finalizing the first-ever international treaty to tackle the plastics crisis will resume this August in Geneva.  But that will be less than a year after a meaningful agreement at the last round of talks was “derailed by a coalition of nations closely allied with the fossil fuel industry.” More than a hundred countries had agreed to curb plastic production, but some oil-producing nations, led by Saudi Arabia and Russia, repeatedly blocked progress.

That sounds discouraging, doesn’t it?  But activists associated with groups like NRDC will be back in Geneva to push for a strong treaty reducing plastic production, phasing out the most harmful chemicals used in plastics, and eliminating the most toxic forms of plastics.  We have to hope they will be successful.

In the meantime, there’s another reason to hope for change.  We all know that current efforts to recycle plastic haven’t gone very far. Although glass and aluminum can be recycled endlessly, plastic cannot. 

According to Lindsey Botts, writing in the Summer 2025 issue of Sierra magazine, “Almost all the plastic ever created is still with us, polluting the planet.”  But he asks: “What if we had a better way to recycle it?”  His answer: “Nature may offer one solution.”

Here’s the hopeful part.  Botts notes that in 2016, Japanese scientists discovered tiny bacteria that were breaking down plastic in a pile of trash.  The bacteria were consuming one of the most common plastics, one that’s used in food wrappers, clothes, even water bottles.

We’ve since learned that other bacteria can do something similar.  One family of bacteria apparently munches on PET (a type of clear, durable plastic) in wastewater. And in a lab, scientists observed still another form of bacteria working on plastic in seawater.

Bacteria can’t actually eat plastic, but they can absorb it.  Some bacteria do this by producing chemicals that liquefy plastic.  They soak up the resulting goo and use some of it as energy.  What they don’t consume becomes a material that can be used to form new plastic.

Botts concedes that this process is relatively slow.  It requires the right temperature and amount of moisture, and creating those conditions outside of a lab can be challenging.  But a French company has found a way to process about 12,000 water bottles a day.  That will only scratch the surface of the half-a-trillion bottles people are using every year.  But it’s a start.

I agree with Botts’s conclusion:  More plastic is entering the world every day, and bacteria can’t clean up all of it.  Not yet. “The best solution” is still to “stop making and buying plastic.” 

I’ve been doing what I can, buying much less plastic in the past few years.  Here in San Francisco, we put our waste in three bins.  One of them holds trash that must go into landfill, but the other two take items for recycling and for composting.  And that makes things a lot easier.  Instead of plastic bottles, I opt for aluminum cans.  Instead of plastic plates and glasses, I use compostable paper ones or old-fashioned glass and ceramics. 

Even if you don’t live where you can do composting, you can still avoid using plastic as much as possible.  Instead of plastic, you can choose recyclable items made of aluminum or glass.

Of course, plastic has its uses.  It may be necessary, for example, in medical settings.  But even there, the amount of plastic can probably be reduced.

Instead of continuing to follow the lazy ways of our past, grabbing a plastic item and pretending that it doesn’t matter, let’s all adopt a different approach. 

Let’s think about the future of our planet. Until we can track down more and more helpful bacteria, let’s try to avoid buying plastic as much as we possibly can.