#3: Plastic poisoning: the new passive smoking
Image: screen grab from Clicks website.
We’re only just beginning to realise how serious long-term exposure to microscopic plastic particles is likely to be for our health. While plastic-polluting corporations lobby for business-as-usual, none of us is safe from the indestructible toxic sludge that’s been building in our air, water, and food for the past 70 years — not even those doing the polluting.
What’s a lethal dose of plastics poisoning?
We don’t know yet, but one day we will.
Consider Marie Curie. She gave herself a lethal dose of radiation after carrying in her lab coat the very elements whose discovery bagged her a Nobel for physics and chemistry. Science didn’t know yet that radioactive materials can curdle our genes, and possibly dispatch us with a nasty little tumour.
Mull on that while we stand in the checkout queue at Clicks, because otherwise the wait will be as dull as unbuttered toast.
‘Do as I say, not as I do’ — the gospel according to Clicks just about every big corporate
My Liverpudlian mum calls these places ‘mals’, as in the ciggie brand Pall Mall, or ‘mal-ware’. Us Saffers call them ‘malls’, as in maul, haul, appal.
Both seem fitting for this point of planetary inflection. A UN-directed effort to put a global treaty in place to cut plastic pollution just failed epically. Most countries wanted a strong agreement that’d turn off the tap on pollution by cutting virgin plastic production and ban many of the poisonous chemicals they carry in their lab-baked DNA. But a few greedy petro-states made sure this didn't happen. So now the polluters keep profiting, while you and I have to keep mopping up the mess while also getting exposed to potentially lethal doses of plastics poisoning.
What these polluters don’t seem to realise, though, is that none of us is safe from this novel form of pollution. We’re all soaking up the indestructible toxic sludge that’s been building in our air, food and water for the past 70 years. If we don’t want to passive-smoke, we can walk away from the smokers’ corner. We can’t escape microscopic plastics.
This recent moment at the Clicks checkout shows what we’re up against, here and around the world.
The dull-as-unbuttered-toast queue
It’s a Sunday afternoon. My mum and I are en route to a family braai, and we’ve handbrake-turned into the nearest shopping centre to pick up a chips-n-choccie something to add to the spread.
This lands me in the queue in Clicks in a mall that’s so generic, it could be in Cape Town, Cairo, or modern-day Carthage. These temples to consumerism are designed this way: stun punters with a disorienting interior; keep us lost in space and time; dazzle us with sparkly things. *Insert ‘jackpot winnings’ sound effect.*
Up on the wall, above our heads, is a plus-sized poster with stylish font in muted beige, cream, and ivory: “Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.”
Yet all around us, at every point on the compass, is row upon row upon row upon row of single-use plastic. All manner of content — cosmetics, sugary treats, chips, trinkets, more cosmetics — most of which is packaged in a material that’s indestructible, but will be used only once.
The contents won’t last long, but the packaging will. It’ll either end up getting fossilised in a municipal landfill. [Our tax money will pay for the city’s waste system to take responsibility for this going-nowhere material.]
Or, it’ll become pollution in the environment, where it’ll get milled down into particles so tiny that these can now even get through the body’s most sophisticated defence: the blood-brain barrier. [We will pick up the tab for this pollution too, whether we’re paying a private medical scheme to treat the health complications from long-term exposure to plastic in the environment and having it clogged in our bodies; or whether our taxes are paying for treatment through the public health sector.]
See who’s not paying for the cost of the pollution clean-up or your and my treatment for plastic poisoning?
Two for the price of one a tumour
The checkout fellow breaks into a full-throated grin when he rings up my chips-n-choccie combo.
‘If you buy these… ‘ he points at the two items, ‘you get…’
… a free single-use plastic bottle!
What he actually says is that I can get a free cool drink as part of the promotion. What he doesn’t know he’s saying is that the promotion means I get a free single-use plastic bottle that happens to contain whatever sugary drink takes my fancy.
‘I prefer water.’
‘No problem!’ his smile doesn’t miss a beat. I can get a bottle of water if I prefer.
Here’s the economics behind this kind of offer: the big players higher up the value chain — the manufacturers, producers, and retailers — aren’t just making profit on the content of the bottle, they’re making money on the bottle itself. Double the incentive to move stock.
Clicks’s promotion is at odds with what it’s asking of its consumers. That we be good citizens — reduce, re-use, recycle — while pushing us to do the exact opposite: consume, consume, consume.
I asked the Clicks Group for comment: in the context of the plastic treaty failing earlier this month, what is the group’s policy on single-use plastics? And how does the retail chain’s August promotion square with its messaging around getting the consumer to take responsibility for the plastic waste resulting from what it stocks on its shelves?
Click’s senior management said they were not available for comment.
This mundane queuing moment is a perfect wrap-up to the four-part investigation, Piles of sh*t, which ran in the Daily Maverick recently.
The series starts with a hyper-local story, looking at single-use plastic nappies and the impact on people and cattle health in communal grasslands in the Eastern Cape. But it broadens to look at the global system that’s allowing this kind of self-destructive pollution to continue. The series draws attention to the most powerful players in the system — governments and corporations — and makes the case for a whole-of-society response to throttle the pollution.
Most urgently, it points out that corporations have a legal and moral responsibility to help realise our constitutional right to a healthy, safe environment. They must be part of turning off the tap of pollution, instead of continuing to profit from a system that asks the rest of us to mop up the spill and treat our plastic-poisoned bodies once the ‘spill’ has happened.
The final article left me winded: microplastics are now so everywhere that they’re even blowing in over some of southern Africa’s most rugged and remote high-altitude water catchments, and that plastic poisoning is going to be as real as the effects of other kinds of toxic exposure.
Who gives a damn?
What was striking during the research for the series was how disengaged the corporates were. I canvased several big nappy manufacturers, and the retailers who fill their shelves with this noxious form of single-use plastic, to find out what their policy is on single-use plastics and how this squares with the products they fill their shelves with (hint, not a re-usable nappy in sight!).
Most either didn’t respond to my emails and phone calls. Some deftly sidestepped them. Others sent through responses that were so thin and curated as to say nothing at all but look sparkly, like glitter.
This is why their communications consultants call themselves ‘reputation managers’ — they don’t even pretend to be honest information brokers. [History buff moment: back before it was called ‘public relations’, spin-doctoring for brand management was known more bluntly as ‘propaganda’. You can understand why the PR sector renamed and re-branded.]
These corporates are happy to spend a king’s ransom on wooing us as consumers with lavish, seductive marketing campaigns. But when they have the more serious responsibility to engage with us as fellow citizens through the important democratic pillar that is accountability-driven journalism, they’re very quiet. Either they’re deliberately ghosting the query in the hope that they can kill the story, or they simply don’t give a damn.
Do the people running these corporations and their hired media handlers not understand that plastics pollution is out of control, and we’ll soon be facing a new public health crisis: plastics poisoning? Do they realise they’re no safer than the rest of us? We’re all soaking up this toxic sludge together.
In solidarity,
Leonie
Itinerant reporter, captain of the good ship Story Ark, and travel companion to the irrepressible cat called Mouse.