Hello everyone! Welcome back to my blog where I discover various perspectives around pollution. It has been some time since my last post, so allow me to provide a brief recap. Previously, I talked about how scientists are often employing a “zoomed out”, “global” perspective on environmental issues. This ends up generalizing the effects of pollution onto everybody as a collective “we”. But that does not mean we should not explore the pollution issue from a global perspective. In this post, we will be looking at pollution on Earth not as an astronaut floating in space, but as a skydiver observing the Earth from within the Earth itself. This will allow us to uncover disparities in pollution effects felt in the global North versus the global South. Since I talked about plastic pollution exceeding limits safe for humanity in my previous post, I will continue to focus on the topic of plastic pollution here.
Most of us would have noticed the increased attention on the environmental impact of single-use plastic in recent years. I still vividly remember how in 2018, the picture of a turtle with a plastic straw stuck in its nose went viral on social media, propelling many netizens to reflect on their use of plastic straws (Cuda & Glazner, 2015). A very harrowing (and very real) statistic that keeps appearing in the media every few years is that if the pollution rates continue to increase, the weight of plastic in the sea will exceed that of the fish by 2050 (Zoellner, 2020)
These messages create a narrative frame that looks something like this:
This was what the plastic-free movement looked like (especially in the richer countries) when it first started (CBC News, 2017; Plastic Free Foundation, n.d.). The issue with this narrative frame is that it is overly simplified, focused on individuals, and generalized.
However, as the movement evolved, people started realising how the issue of plastic pollution is entrenched in systemic inequalities triggered by an unequal ecological exchange between the richer global north and the poorer global south. For instance, the demand for plastics in the United States (US) is astronomically high- they produce 42 million tonnes of plastic waste a year, more than any other country in the world (Karidis, 2021). The reason why they could do that without worry is that they did not need to deal with the waste –they shipped their plastic waste to 89 countries around the world (Karidis, 2021).
With many other countries in the global North (such as Canada) dealing with their waste in the same way, China was a dumping ground for half of the world’s plastic waste before 2016 (Karidis, 2021). When China placed a ban on shipped plastic waste in 2016, the waste from the global North reached countries with more lax laws in Southeast Asia. It is no wonder that eight of out 10 rivers that hold 90% of ocean plastics come from Asia (Gray, 2018, as cited in Nguyen & Roth, 2019), and that the top five plastic polluting countries are China, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam (Leung, 2018, as cited in Nguyen & Roth, 2019)
As long as the richer countries continue to pass the burden of treating waste to the poorer countries, the issue of plastic pollution will continue to persist. As a result, the effects of plastic pollution are disproportionately borne by those in the global South.
In the next post, I will be delving deeper into systems leading to an unequal ecological exchange between the global north and the global south, which is the root cause of the disparity in pollution effects felt in the global North versus the global South.
Till then,
Keeping looking!
References:
CBC News (2017, July 8). Opinion | opinion | want to save the planet? start by saying no to the plastic straw | CBC News. CBCnews. Retrieved March 10, 2022, from https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/opinion-joanne-seiff-disposable-straws-1.4192936
Cuda, H. S., & Glazner, E. (2015, November 11). The turtle that became the anti-plastic straw poster child. Plastic Pollution Coalition. Retrieved March 10, 2022, from https://www.plasticpollutioncoalition.org/blog/2015/10/27/the-turtle-that-became-the-anti-plastic-straw-poster-child
Gray, A. (2018, June 8). Around 90% of all river-borne plastic that ends up in the ocean comes from just 10 rivers. World Economic Forum. Retrieved March 10, 2022, from https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluting-our-oceans-comes-from-just-10-rivers/
Karidis , A. (2021, January 12). What’s the fix for the U.S. plastic waste pile up? Waste360. Retrieved March 10, 2022, from https://www.waste360.com/plastics/whats-fix-us-plastic-waste-pile
Leung, H. (2018, April 22). Five Asian countries dump more plastic into oceans than anyone else combined: How you can help. Forbes. Retrieved March 10, 2022, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/hannahleung/2018/04/21/five-asian-countries-dump-more-plastic-than-anyone-else-combined-how-you-can-help/#2c7c17901234
Nguyen , A. G., & Roth , R. J. (2019, January 31). Plastic in the oceans is not the fault of the Global South. The Conversation. Retrieved March 10, 2022, from https://theconversation.com/plastic-in-the-oceans-is-not-the-fault-of-the-global-south-110247
Plastic Free Foundation. (n.d.). How to stop using plastic straws. Plastic Free July. Retrieved March 10, 2022, from https://www.plasticfreejuly.org/get-involved/what-you-can-do/plastic-straws/
Zoellner, D. (2020, July 23). Ocean plastic could triple by 2040 and outnumber fish by 2050, study says. The Independent. Retrieved March 10, 2022, from https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/ocean-plastic-fish-climate-crisis-sea-study-a9635241.html