Kendall Stanley: Inevitable damage

Plastics.

That one word suggestion of a line of work to pursue for recent college grad Ben Braddock, played by Dustin Hoffman in 1967’s “The Graduate,” couldn’t possibly have foreseen just how massive plastics would become.

Plastics, if you haven’t noticed, are everywhere.

Plastics have come a long way from 1865, when John Wesley Hyatt was tinkering to find a substitute for ivory pool balls. Along with his brother, they developed celluloid, which could explode. But they pushed ahead and started making celluloid dentures, combs, brush handles, piano keys and knickknacks, according to a story by Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker.

And then the begetting began.

“Hyatt’s invention, often described as the world’s first commercially produced plastic, was followed a few decades later by Bakelite. Bakelite was followed by polyvinyl chloride, which was, in turn, followed by polyethylene, low-density polyethylene, polyester, polypropylene, Styrofoam, Plexiglas, Mylar, Teflon, polyethylene terephthalate (familiarly known as PET) — the list goes on and on. And on. Annual global production of plastic currently runs to more than eight hundred billion pounds. What was a problem of scarcity is now a problem of superabundance,” Kolbert writes.

Kolbert noted that plastic is found everywhere, from the bottom of the Mariana Trench, 36,000 feet below sea level, to the shores of faraway islands.

“The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a collection of floating debris that stretches across six hundred thousand square miles between California and Hawaii, is thought to contain some 1.8 trillion plastic shards. Among the many creatures being done in by all this junk are corals, tortoises, and elephants — in particular, the elephants of Sri Lanka. In recent years, 20 of them have died after ingesting plastic at a landfill near the village of Pallakkadu.”

Now the major concern is microplastics, produced by the degradation of plastics. And when they degrade, the chemicals that went into making them leach out as well. Scientists found that a degrading CVS plastic bag leached 13,000 different compounds, ones from Wal-Mart, 15,000 compounds.

Your contribution to all this? Americans produce about 500 pounds of plastic waste a year, well more than the average European.

The only way to handle the tsunami of plastics that wash over us every day? Limit production.

But how to do that when plastics are so ubiquitous?

Talk about cutting off the supply means going up against the oil and gas industries, as they produce the raw materials from whence all this plastic comes from in the first place.

And recycling isn’t a panacea — much of what is “recycled” ends up in landfills because it was to degraded or full of extraneous junk.

As possible solutions come up in the future here’s one thing you might think about when considering whether they are reasonable or not — if you are alive, you have microplastics in your body and continued production will only exacerbate that.

And it all started with billiard balls.

When it’s hot, it’s hot

Yes, the Southwest is used to hot weather. Not Northern Michigan hot, but really, really HOT.

As I write this Phoenix has endured double-digit days with temperatures above 110. In Florida, the heat index has topped 100 for days (personally give me Phoenix rather than Miami). And the Gulf of Mexico is a bathtub with water temperatures approaching 100 degrees!

The question waged in The Washington Post is this: What happens if the electricity goes out?

Virtually everyone in the Phoenix area has air conditioning and the area is blessed with a robust electric grid.

Researchers simulated what would happen if the residents of Phoenix, Atlanta and Detroit were struck by a heat wave and a complete blackout that lasts 48 hours before power starts to be incrementally restored. The outcomes were deadly in all three cities, but the results for Phoenix were particularly striking, where almost everyone in the city relies on air conditioning to weather extreme heat. The study predicted that about half the population would require emergency department care and about 13,000 would die, according to the Post story.

Certainly, it is easy to make fun of the souls who live in those hotspots but ever-increasing heat waves and unrelenting need for power could spell catastrophe for those living there.

Power officials told the Post the Salt River Project and Arizona Public Service, the two main electricity providers in Phoenix, said they are ready to handle the extreme heat, using a mix of energy from hydropower facilities, natural gas plants, nuclear reactors, wind farms and other sources.

The Salt River Project is forecasting demand that could exceed the record set last year, but the utility is confident it has enough capacity to meet that demand, said Pam Syrjala, the director of supply, trading and fuels.

And just remember, summer isn’t over yet.

— Kendall P. Stanley is retired editor of the News-Review. He can be contacted at kendallstanley@charter.net. The opinions expressed in this column are those of the writer and not necessarily of the Petoskey News-Review or its employees.

This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Kendall Stanley: Inevitable damage