A bridge too far?

This is a bridge near my town. It gets trashed every other year due to flooding - a natural phenomenon in this region. Whether it's getting worse due to climate change, I can't say, but it's always been a part of life in this area. Dry spells, then heavy rains, flooding rivers, washed out floodplains, which upsets life quite a bit. I think Aboriginal people, while they mostly lived around freshwater rivers and floodplains, would have been able to pack up camp and head for higher ground a lot more easily than Europeans.

Anyway, inasmuch as bridges are great, they're not really designed for such violence. I can't find a photo of the most recent aftermath, last year, but the steel railing was bent and buckled, and just about totally ripped off, and many of the trees on the banks had come down, causing huge erosion on each side. Quite incredible to see. Here's a pic I found online of when the water's up, but not the actual damage of the aftermath. Anyway, I'm sure you can imagine...

In last year's deluge, most of the timber pedestrian walkway got swept away. I thought they'd rebuild in concrete, But the local council outsourced the reconstruction to a company called Replas. The material is made of a recycled plastic called Enduroplank. On their website they state that Enduroplank "provides an ethical alternative to using timber".

It's hard to know which plastics they recycle to make this decking material. I'm gathering from reading their website that it's a range, most likely #3 - #7. Although possibly some #1 and #2 that can no longer be recycled into that category, along with some virgin plastic, not to mention other kinds of things like colouring and strengthening agents such as UV stabilisers.

Even this white piece, with the screws in it, connecting the plastic
decking to the old timber, is plastic.

When I took these photos the other day, the morning sun was beating down. The plastic was quite hot and you could really smell the off-gassing. I got a bit nauseous and I didn't even walk over the whole bridge. Well, I'm less tolerant to it than many, but it was not a pleasant smell, to be sure.

Plastic getting ready to erode, straight into the river and downstream to the Pacific Ocean

To be fair, this is one of the poorest shires in the state of NSW. This bridge was a rattling timber death trap before they replaced it with this stuff, so I can understand why they chose it, I guess.

Recently, a company by the name of Terracycle has come to prominence in just about every country I can think of around the world for taking hard-to-recycle products, such as toothbrushes, toothpaste tubes and cigarette butts and facilitating their recycling into products like the this decking. Terracycle founder, Tom Szaky, says that the plastic, even after being heated and melted down, retains the smell - a minty fresh-breath smell for the toothpaste tubes, and I guess, a stale, bad-breath tobacco smell for the cigarette filters. So the cigarette butts must go into things such as railway sleepers. Hmmm...

Harold Johnson, over at his blog, The Flotsam Diaries, has done some excellent research and reporting on the recycling process. Basically, a lot of recycling is greenwash. Do take some time to click on the above link when you can and read his "The Triangle is a Lie" three-part series. Very enlightening (and somewhat depressing as well). Here's a chart the Flotsam Diaries posted up a while back on their Facebook page. It shows how plastic is just about never RE-cycled... it's downcycled, into ever increasing UNrecyclable products, which will ultimately never biodegrade, and which will have to go to landfill.

To quote The Flotsam Diaries, It is a

"terrible myth that plastic recycling reduces plastic use. NOAA even argues this, with this infographic. Yet look at it. All the recycled plastic becomes different, downcycled plastic things. Nothing in that infographic is a closed loop. Plastic recycling creates insanely cheap feedstocks so mfrs can make new things of plastic that were uneconomical before. Recycling doesn't make less plastic & plastic pollution in the world. It makes more"

If you read the publicity on pages such as Terracycle and Replas (or any recycling company), they're not downcycling, they're UPcycling. Really? My understanding of "upcycling" involves something like, making a birdbath out of an old dish or a garden table out of some palettes. Creative, low-impact DIY things we do at home with "junk" to keep that stuff out of landfill.

But shipping plastic to China, melting it down in factories into pellets, such that their fibres become shorter, and the plastic more brittle each time, moulding it into other objects, adding a range of plasticisers and virgin plastic to the mix, and then shipping those objects to other countries for sale as new items? That is NOT upcycling.

I might sound a big angry about all this, and the fact is, I am. Plastic recycling companies argue that they are doing a great service by keeping this stuff out of landfill. We have a dichotomy in waste disposal that goes like this:

Landfill = BAD
Recycling = GOOD

Well, when it comes to plastic, that is, for the most part, Greenwash, if not downright hogwash. Plastic lumber? Plastic railway sleepers? Plastic park benches? The Replas website boasts that its products "will never split, rot or need painting" (comparing it to timber, obviously). Well, no. And I appreciate that timber often needs to get coated with some horrible termite-resistant chemicals. (But we also have some brilliant, termite-resistant, rot-resistant timbers in Australia, such as the Turpentine, traditionally used on bridges and wharves). We know what happens to plastic in the sun. After only a few years, it perishes, it starts to crumble. It fades. These wonderful plastic claims sound like the claims the CD makers made in the '80s... will never scratch!

And timber, if managed properly, is eminently renewable. It's a resource that, when finished with, will rot and "feed the earth", as William McDonough says in his Cradle to Cradle design philosophy and book of the same name.

Yes, plastic can be "recycled", but only a certain number of times, and in an ever downward spiral, and then it must go to landfill. So they stopped the original pieces of plastic going to landfill. Great. But those bottles shouldn't have been produced in the first place! Turn it off at the tap, as Dianna Cohen has said.

Creating these plastic building materials generates a need for them where there wasn't one in the first place. They are cheaper than timber and concrete, and so will encourage ever increasing production of plastics. The recycling companies never mention the enormous fossil fuels required to ship this stuff over to China to process. No one tells you it gets shipped to China. But it does. I phoned my local Council, and then their plastic buyer, and asked them. They told me. Another post coming on this.

And all that plastic out in natural environments - parks, rivers, bridges, beaches, boardwalks, swamps. My heart just sinks thinking of what will happen in the next flood in my town. And in other environments, big winds, big waves, harsh sun. Nature will punish this plastic and within a short space of time, microplastic will be flowing into rivers, streams and into the mouths of lugworms and plankton. The larger, broken-off chunks will be eaten by fish and birds. Nothing like getting into the food chain at ground level for better bioaccumulation.

And I can't help thinking my council has chosen the cheaper stuff because they know it will get washed away, and they actually don't have the funds to repair this poor old bridge, and our town is always last on a poor Shire's list. And that's another great problem - the very cheapness of plastic is why it's so often the first choice.

I say, bury the stuff. DON'T recycle it. Get it out of our world (not that landfill is out of our world, true. There is no Away). STOP making it. BAN it. Even if you didn't care about the environment, wouldn't you care that it was in our food out there, and that these perishing plastic lumbers and timbers and sleepers, are facilitating that entry into our food chain at a much greater level and faster rate?