The Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s war on plastic and prosperity

Editorial note: On February 7, 2005, Britain’s Ellen MacArthur broke the world record for solo circumnavigation of the globe with a time of 71 days, 14 hours, 18 minutes, and 33 seconds. This weekend is the 21st anniversary of her accomplishment. Since then, she has established an NGO that seeks to prevent the use of plastic. This report on the anti-plastic agenda of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation was first posted in October 2022 and is reproduced in full.

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Opinion polls show Americans are deeply troubled over issues such as inflation, immigration, spiking crime rates, and soaring gasoline prices. They don’t show any anxiety over the “plastic pollution crisis.”

But plastic has become a big worry for the United Nations and dozens of the world’s largest corporations, such as Visa, Coca-Cola, Unilever and Nestlé. To address this supposed crisis, the plastic worriers have aligned with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF), a little-known yet obviously influential nonprofit based in the United Kingdom.

This is how the EMF describes what they have in store for us:

We must change how we design, use, and reuse plastics. We cannot simply recycle or reduce our way out of the plastic pollution crisis. If we don’t act now, by 2050 there could be more plastic than fish in the oceans.

Although plastic pollution on the high seas is a valid concern, Americans and those who live like us are not the cause of it. A 2021 report from Our World in Data showed that that the United States, despite having 25 percent of the planet’s total gross domestic product, is responsible for a tiny 0.25 percent of the plastic reaching the ocean. Added all together, every nation in North America, all of Europe, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, and Russia contribute only 5.5 percent of the problem.

Developing and low-income nations in Asia and Africa produce 90 percent of the ocean’s plastic problem. Together, China and India are the cause of more than 20 percent.

Rapidly helping the impoverished and developed world become wealthy with healthy waste management systems is the credible (to say nothing of humane) solution to plastic waste in the ocean and many other, much more pressing problems. Reliable and low-cost electricity, the rule of law, human rights, a stable currency, and a few other critical inputs are the proven recipe for the change they need.

But those aren’t the changes the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and its wealthy corporate allies have in mind when they advise “We must change.” Instead, the “we” they’re addressing is us. Rather than addressing obvious problems of poverty with the proven solutions for helping the rest of the world get rich, the EMF has invented a new economic model:

We’re a charity committed to creating a circular economy, which is designed to eliminate waste and pollution, circulate products and materials (at their highest value), and regenerate nature. It’s an economic system that delivers better outcomes for people, and the environment.

End waste and pollution, save the world, make everything more valuable, and improve life for everyone? Why hasn’t somebody thought of this before?

Sarcasm aside, this seems plagiarized from countless “What I Wish For” essays annually submitted to elementary school teachers. A lot of little kids also include equally vague plots for world peace and bringing lost pooches back from the grave.

It is remarkable that supposedly serious adults have recycled these platitudes into a business plan for the planet.

Nature Is Messy

If volcanoes could be blamed on the plastic industry, then the Ellen MacArthur Foundation would certainly (and justifiably) refer to the outcome as “waste and pollution.” Nature is often catastrophically wasteful. The EMF agenda is based on a fantasy world that doesn’t exist.

The current plan—as practiced for most of the past three centuries and particularly the past 50–70 years—has lifted billions from poverty, put a few billion of us into a standard of living that was inconceivable to even the richest of us a century ago, effectively ended famines, radically extended lifespans, and (not coincidentally) continues to clean up the worst of the planet’s pollution.

So that’s the market economy.

What does the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s “circular economy” have to offer?

The eponymous founder is British Dame Ellen MacArthur, a retired competitive yachtswoman who once held the world record for solo circumnavigating the globe. According to her official bio, carrying on board all the supplies needed for the 71-day journey “gave her a very real understanding of what it means to rely on a finite supply of resources, as on the boat food, water and fuel were inescapably linked to success or failure.”

From all this, she concluded that “on land too we rely on finite resources in the form of materials, energy and water.”

Those hoping to grasp this concept without spending the two months alone at sea could attend the first day of an introductory economics class. As explained by Investopedia: “Scarcity in economics refers to when the demand for a resource is greater than the supply of that resource, as resources are limited.”

A September 2021 meta-analysis of research studies on the circular economy by the Journal of Industrial Ecology found more than 100 different definitions of the term, with many “deliberately vague, but principally uncontroversial” that do not address “conflicts, trade-offs, and problems.”

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation fits the trend. Peek through the otherwise inscrutable descriptions of the circular economy presented on the EMF website and the only overarching agenda seems to be that nothing . . . should ever . . . be thrown away:

For billions of years, natural systems have regenerated themselves. Waste is a human invention [emphasis added]. [From the page titled “Regenerate nature”]

The second principle of the circular economy is to circulate products and materials at their highest value. This means keeping materials in use, either as a product or, when that can no longer be used, as components or raw materials. This way, nothing becomes waste [emphasis added] and the intrinsic value of products and materials are retained. [From the page titled “Circulate products and materials”]

Although it sometimes seems like waste is inevitable in certain situations, waste is actually the result of design choices. There is no waste in nature, it is a concept we have introduced [emphasis added]. [From the page titled “Eliminate waste and pollution”]

Waste—or “entropy,” for those who recall physics class—is the natural state of the universe. Each conversion of a material into a new item leads to energy lost as heat and degrading of the quality and/or quantity of the material. Increasing chaos is inevitable—and it requires more energy and resources to reassemble materials that are falling apart.

Plastic, according to a September 2020 NPR report, “degrades each time it is reused, meaning it can’t be reused more than once or twice,” and since “new plastic is cheap . . . it’s almost always less expensive and of better quality to just start fresh.”

Metals, on the other hand, retain value and can be recycled with comparatively less effort and energy. Most discarded iron and steel items (70 percent or more) are recycled into new products.

In that Journal of Industrial Ecology report, under a section titled “A neglect of established knowledge,” the authors of the paper (three academics, two from Sweden and one from the United Kingdom) made the point this way:

A recurrent critique that is addressed to the circular economy literature is that it ignores much established knowledge. In particular, it neglects the thermodynamic teaching that one can neither create nor destroy matter; whatever resources are used up must end up in the environmental system somewhere, they cannot be destroyed but only converted and dissipated. A circular economy future where waste no longer exists, where material loops are closed, and the place products are recycled indefinitely is therefore, in any practical sense, impossible . . . [emphasis added]

Nature as a “circular” system may be a nice marketing tool, but every Floridian putting their life back together after Hurricane Ian can attest that when nature gets spinning in a circle it can lay waste to a lot of the natural environment, plus the energy and materials that were used by humans to bring order to the chaotic world.

And, though less common, the eruption of a volcano lays waste to landscapes, creatures, structures and often the people in its path. In 1991 Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines launched what a U.S. Geological Survey report called “avalanches of searing hot ash, gas, and pumice fragments” that buried the “once deep valleys” nearby in debris that was 660 feet deep. The 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide (a greenhouse gas) that Pinatubo blasted into the atmosphere damaged the ozone layer and measurably altered the planet’s temperature for a year. A 1982 eruption at Mexico’s El Chichón had a similar effect on global climate. Closer to home, the 1980 Mt. St. Helens explosion in Washington smashed 210 square miles of nearby wilderness and removed 1,700 feet from the top of the mountain.

If volcanoes could be blamed on the plastic industry, then the Ellen MacArthur Foundation would certainly (and justifiably) refer to the outcome as “waste and pollution.”

Nature is often catastrophically wasteful. The EMF agenda is based on a fantasy world that doesn’t exist.

Worshiping the Absolute Sanctity of Everything

Freshkills near New York City, until 2001 the largest landfill on Earth … has since been transformed into a refuge where ospreys and other wildlife thrive. How’s that for recycling?

A circular economy has also been tried and revealed to be very messy.

In more primitive days of just a bit more than a century ago, we had a circular economy for human waste, which at its “highest value” was prized for its ability to “regenerate nature.” Humans produced a lot of it, but quite a bit was also left in smelly piles on the streets by the horses we still needed.

Fortunately, modern farming now uses far more effective synthetic fertilizers (and one of the most important is made possible by natural gas). But unlike the circular economy of our recent past, human waste no longer has value. It’s now just definitively “waste”—nasty, smelly waste that needs special sewage systems and treatment to dispose of properly.

And yet, this recently . . . wasteful . . . behavior has provided us with “an economic system that delivers better outcomes for people.” Our environment is better off as well.

Even though nature doesn’t improve on how it cleans up after itself, people have made profound progress. Modern sanitary landfills and trash collection are a manmade land conservation miracle. Drive by an old landfill today and you might mistake it for a golf course, or a public park – because that’s what they often become. An Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) primer on repurposing landfills reports that “increasingly common end uses include parks, hiking trails, wildlife habitat, sports fields, and golf courses.”

Freshkills near New York City, until 2001 the largest landfill on Earth, is a premier example. It has since been transformed into a refuge where ospreys and other wildlife thrive.

How’s that for recycling?

Successful reuse of discarded plastic is another example of remarkable progress in sanitary waste management. But acceptance of all this doesn’t fit within the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s totalitarian theory that all waste can be eradicated.

According to the EMF’s own data, when plastic beverage bottles are collected for recycling they often find new life as polyester fibers in items such as carpeting and clothing. The 2016 analysis promoting the EMF’s “New Plastics Economy” also reports useful applications for recovered plastic junk in the creation of “plastic lumber,” plastic pipes, and trash bags. In addition to cutting down on the plastic getting thrown away, these second-use products reduce the need for new plastic and the carbon footprint needed to harvest and process trees.

Success? Proof that humans are innovative critters with an endless supply of ideas about how to squeeze every nickel of value out of materials and in the process tidy up the place a bit?

By any reasonable analysis, the answer should be a resounding “YES!”

But not for the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. The EMF report portrays these aftermarket plastic products as failures that represent “just one additional use cycle rather than creating a truly circular model.”

Many conventional religious faiths venerate specific objects, people, or creatures. The circular economy, as practiced by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and its allies, promotes the absolute sanctity of everything, where every single molecule we use must be preserved and nothing may be discarded.

This isn’t conservation. It’s absolutism and religious zealotry.

Some of our stuff must eventually lose all reasonable value, relative to what it could be replaced with, so its “highest value” (to borrow the EMF phrasing) is to be put where it inflicts no damage. Worthless items not disposed of properly acquire negative value because they pollute the value of what we truly treasure, such as landscapes and oceans.

That’s why it’s a smart investment for wealthy nations to build sanitary waste management systems that elevate the value of worthless items from negative to neutral. The component parts in a landfill may have lost individual value. But the land itself can be repurposed into parks, ballparks, and more.

A less dogmatic religion might encourage more of this as clever a plan to “eliminate waste and pollution” and “regenerate nature.”

The most successful “circular economy” outcome for plastic in America is to turn it into electricity. An EPA report (using 2018 data) shows 15.8 percent of discarded plastic was used for “combustion with energy recovery,” versus only 8.7 percent recycled and 75.6 percent put in a landfill.

The recycling rate for even the easiest to repurpose plastics was less than 30 percent. According to a 2021 New York Times report: “Though many American communities dutifully collect plastic for recycling, much of the scrap has been sent overseas, where it frequently ends up in landfills, or in rivers, streams and the ocean.”

The top destinations the Times listed were China, Malaysia, and Indonesia. According to Our World in Data, these three nations put together accounted for more than 20 percent of the plastic trash reaching the ocean in 2019.

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation would have done more to protect the oceans if they had run a campaign to convince those dutiful household recyclers that it was okay to throw the plastic trash into a sanitary American landfill.

Perhaps they should have replaced the logos on curbside recycling bins with photos of plastic bottles floating down some dirty river in Malaysia on the way to the ocean.

A Greenwashing Front?

The EMF may have her name on it, but the agenda belongs as much to the corporations such as Coke that made it happen.

Even as we do a fine job keeping trash out of the ocean, the EPA reports discarded plastic is less than 20 percent of the waste in American landfills.

The added irony is that almost all of it was created from what would otherwise be the waste product of refining oil and natural gas. The molecules that become plastic polymers would become something less valuable, or discarded, if not used for plastic. And then we’d need to use up something more valuable to create all the stuff currently made from plastic.

Trees, for example. And that would get expensive. A 2011 research paper produced for the legislature of Northern Ireland crunched the numbers on the “paper or plastic” decision regarding grocery bags and came to this conclusion:

It takes more than four times as much energy to manufacture a paper bag as it does to manufacture a plastic bag. For paper bag production, forests must be cut down (trees are absorbers of greenhouse gases) and then the subsequent manufacturing of bags produces greenhouse gases. . . . Paper bags generate 70% more air and 50 times more water pollutants than plastic bags.

The report also found that paper bags generated 70 percent more air pollution, 50 times the water pollution, and required seven times the trucks to transport them.

Any frugal American knows the truth of this revelation about the usefulness of plastic bags: “They are also put to many other uses in the home . . . such as clearing dog-waste from the streets, and most of them will eventually serve as a bin-liner to safely collect and dispose of household waste.”

In 2020, responding to campaigns against its plastic bottles, Coca-Cola’s head of sustainability observed that the firm’s carbon footprint would increase if the plastic containers were all replaced with aluminum cans or glass bottles.

Coca-Cola ships out 100 billion plastic beverage bottles per year, a major share of the more than 500 billion sold worldwide—most of them made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic. Those bottles are what many of us think of when we think of plastic pollution. A bottle floating in water is the top return for the Google search term “symbol of plastic pollution.”

The Coke sustainability chief said the firm would continue to use plastic because its customers preferred the lightweight and resealable bottles. “Business won’t be in business if we don’t accommodate consumers,” she said.

She is correct. Plastic use, reuse, and disposal has been and will continue to be improved upon. But for all the foregoing reasons and others, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s “plastic pollution crisis” isn’t upon us.

Yet the list of the EMF’s top-level partners includes none other than Coca-Cola.

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation claims to have the “world’s leading circular economy network” and this isn’t a hollow boast. The EMF’s circular economy agenda has also been adopted by the United Nations Environment Programme.

The EMF’s most recent annual report covering the year prior to August 2021, showed £18.1 million revenue ($25 million at the 2021 exchange rate).

Her courageous sailing exploits aside, Ellen MacArthur’s absolutist crusade would have nowhere near its current influence without the corporations and institutions that have plowed tens of millions of dollars into marketing her cause. The EMF may have her name on it, but the agenda belongs as much to the corporations such as Coke that made it happen.

In addition to Coca-Cola (KO), the group’s 21-member strategic partner network includes Unilever (UL), Visa (V), BlackRock (BLK), Nestlé (NSRGY), Danone (BN.PA), Groupe Renault (RNO.PA). There are others, but together, these seven publicly traded firms have a market capitalization of more than $1.2 trillion.

The top-level strategic partner group also includes the EMF’s “main philanthropic funders,” such as the Schmidt Family Foundation (founded with the fortunes of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy), MAVA (a foundation based in Switzerland), and the Sun Institute for Environmental & Sustainability (based in Germany).

A second tier of mere “partners” includes 41 firms and groups, including big names such as Wal-Mart, Starbucks, PepsiCo, Microsoft, Google, Morgan Stanley, and Mars (the maker of M&M’s and other candies). A third tier of EMF members has more than 100 firms.

The EMF’s “funding model” is anchored in these partnerships. The recent annual report noted that a “new Network membership structure” had “increased the income streams in this area.” Line items for “Global Partner Donations” and “Network Income” totaled £2.4 million for 2021 ($3.3 million with the exchange rate at that time).

In addition to that, dedicated funding raised for EMF’s New Plastics Economy Initiative was £3 million in 2021 ($4.1 million). Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Unilever, Danone, the American candymaker Mars, and Wal-Mart were all cited as partners in the project.

“Greenwashing, according to a March 2022 report in Investopedia, “is the process of conveying a false impression or providing misleading information about how a company’s products are more environmentally sound.”

That definition might explain why so many of the world’s most recognizable plastic users are financially aligned with the world’s most identifiable crusader against plastic consumption.

Plastic Puritanism

A 2018 report from Singapore’s National Environment Agency compared the resources used to produce single-use takeout food containers. It showed polystyrene plates and clamshell boxes consuming substantially less energy, water, and land than paper equivalents.

Several of the EMF’s 21 top-tier supporters share a very specific business practice: those PET plastic bottles that Coca-Cola refuses to give up.

Danone and Nestlé (along with Coke’s Dasani) have been ranked as three of the four largest water bottling companies in the world. In addition to the beverage titans in EMF’s support base, SC Johnson packages many of its cleaning products in PET, and Unilever uses it to make jars for goods such as Hellmann’s mayonnaise.

Many of the other corporations in EMF’s top-tier partners are also likely big uses of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic—and for good reason: PET is one of the world’s many economically and environmentally beneficial plastic materials.

So is polystyrene (PS), which is used for everyday items such as the iconic red Solo cups we drink from at parties and a lot of our food packaging. Compared to other plastics, polystyrene is low-cost, highly malleable, heat resistant, and thus perfect packaging for the food service industry.

Pumped full of air, it becomes expanded polystyrene (EPS), sometimes known as “Styrofoam,” the legal trade name for an EPS insulation product made by DuPont. EPS is well known as the material used for everything from foam cups, bowls, and plates to custom-fitted shipping molds for fragile goods.

Because it is an exceptionally useful and low-cost option for serving and maintaining the ideal temperature of food and drink, PS/EPS packaging is frequently discarded with food waste on it. Food contaminate is obviously difficult to clean up efficiently, regardless of the packaging material, but is a “no-no” for recycling.

Even accepting for the sake of argument the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s alarmist and dubious premise that there is a “plastic pollution crisis,” its research shows polystyrene accounts for only 3 percent “of today’s plastic packaging market.” As a tiny slice of the alleged problem, the no-brainer solution for discarded PS/EPS should be enhanced efforts to make sure it all ends up in the care of a sanitary waste disposal system. Without question that is the proven and most efficient way to keep the comparatively small amounts of polystyrene from reaching the ocean.

But even in the worst-case scenario, 2019 research from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution debunked a longstanding myth that polystyrene and its foam cousin last forever in the environment. The research showed that sunlight degrades polystyrene into “dissolved organic carbon and trace amounts of carbon dioxide, at levels far too low to impact climate change,” and that this transformation takes place within centuries and possibly within decades.

So it is odd that such a tiny piece of the plastic packaging waste stream occupies a conspicuously large and negative place in the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s circular economy crusade.

Released in 2016, The New Plastics Economy: Rethinking the Future of Plastics is the EMF’s attempt to “achieve systemic change to overcome stalemates in today’s plastics economy in order to move to a more circular model.”

Unilever is listed as one of the project funders. The forward was written by the president of the U.N. General Assembly.

To the extent that the Ellen MacArthur Foundation ever gets beyond the deliberately vague babble-speak and offers solid policy objectives instead, this report is an example.

A section titled “Selected examples of hard-to-recycle materials and corresponding solutions” singled out polystyrene and arrived at this conclusion: “If the barriers for effective and economically viable collection, sorting, cleaning and recycling of PS cannot be overcome, other packaging solutions could be considered.”

The suggestions for replacement food packaging included paper, cardboard, and even the PET plastic favored by Coca-Cola, Danone, and Nestlé—the planet’s plastic bottle behemoths and perhaps not coincidentally some of the very biggest corporate partners of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

Even the suggestion of paper replacements was dubious. The report praises McDonald’s (one of more than 100 firms listed as EMF members) as a pioneer on this point: “McDonald’s began to phase out its iconic clamshell foam hamburger box in 1990 and is now phasing out styrofoam beverage cups.” Yet the environmental logic for the McDonald’s decision disappeared faster than hot Big Macs.

A 1991 study published in Science magazine compared the life cycle impact of disposable cups made from both polystyrene and paper. Martin B. Hocking, a chemistry professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, found that producing a paper cup instead of one from polystyrene foam consumed 14–20 times more electricity and twice the water. Hocking concluded that “polystyrene foam cups should be given a much more even-handed assessment as regards their environmental impact relative to paper cups than they have received during the past few years.”

Hocking’s analysis has held together since. A 2018 report from Singapore’s National Environment Agency compared the resources used to produce single-use takeout food containers. It showed polystyrene plates and clamshell boxes consuming substantially less energy, water, and land than paper equivalents.

Environmentally and Economically Dangerous

While the Ellen MacArthur Foundation claims that “Decarbonisation of the energy system is necessary and needs to accelerate,” the group’s definition of a solution also excludes nuclear power … the only source of zero-carbon power that could be scaled up to meet the world’s already voracious and growing need.

Spending less for vital production resources—less for water, less for energy—leads directly to a lower price. If you pay a lot less, then you’re likely using much less. This is conservation, in every sense of the word.

What we throw away is often an example of how we “regenerate natural systems.” Elephants and sea turtles were once the primary source of the malleable material used to create piano keys, billiard balls, eyeglass frames, jewelry, combs, and countless other products. A lot of the plastic in the landfills of rich nations is a critical part of the conservation effort to save those species.

The usually tight correlation between ecological and economic values is not factored into the absolutist thinking underpinning the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s circular economy. So, it is inevitable that the nonprofit and its corporate supporters would end up promoting paper over polystyrene and would advance solutions at odds with their presumed objectives.

Energy policy is another area where finding specificity for the EMF’s otherwise vague agenda produces a specifically bad result.

In the group’s “circular economy glossary,” the definition provided for “circular economy” has this in the fine print: “It is underpinned by a transition to renewable energy and materials.” Pull up the definition for “renewable energy” and these are the approved examples: “. . . wind, solar, hydropower, hydrothermal, ocean (wave and tidal), geothermal, and biogas from anaerobic digestion.”

Those options exclude 89 percent of what is currently total worldwide energy production, and 74 percent of total electricity production. It even excludes recycling plastic by burning it to create electricity.

While the Ellen MacArthur Foundation claims that “Decarbonisation of the energy system is necessary and needs to accelerate,” the group’s definition of a solution also excludes nuclear power (currently 10.4 percent of total electricity), the only source of zero-carbon power that could be scaled up to meet the world’s already voracious and growing need.

The approved choices are “wind, solar, and battery technologies.” The wind and the sun are obviously weather-restricted and cannot be scaled up to meet needs. And “battery technologies” is code-speak for magical electricity storage that does not and may never exist. A 2018 report in Massachusetts Institute of Technology Review summarizes the serious work on the subject, finding that, even if the storage capacity were developed, deploying it could become “dangerously unaffordable.”

That’s not an exaggeration. Even for the luckiest of us, economic collapse and possibly starvation would follow rapidly after the loss of reliable and affordable electricity. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation and its strategic partners are promoting an energy policy that is literally dangerous.

Unilever, Coca-Cola, Visa, BlackRock, Danone, Nestlé, and many of the other top EMF partners are publicly traded firms. While they may have no legal duty to boldly disclose this agenda to their tens of millions of individual shareholders, they have a moral obligation to do so.

Less reckless, but no less absurd, is the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s circular economy for food. Typically vague if one doesn’t read through to the fine print, the proposal asserts that “just four crops provide 60% of the world’s calories, while many ingredients that could be used instead and have a lower impact are rarely used.” The sales pitch makes it hard to imagine why these mysterious solutions haven’t been implemented already, since doing so will “provide choices that are better for customers, better for farmers, and better for the environment.”

The fine print is found in an EMF report titled: The Big Food Redesign. An info box on page 45 is titled “High Potential Ingredients to Explore.” The big news is that insects are a “highly nutritious and healthy food source with high fat, protein, vitamin, fibre, and mineral content” yet supposedly “emit fewer greenhouse gases and less ammonia than cattle or pigs, and they require significantly less land and water than cattle rearing.”

So get ready to trade up from sirloins and bacon to “dried yellow mealworms” (recently approved by the European Commission as a “novel food”!) The report does concede that eating bugs has “yet to become mainstream in Western food cultures” and blames this on “negative perceptions.”

Speaking of negative perceptions, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation report notes the culinary experts at the European Commission have also estimated that “algae could account for 18% of protein sources by 2054.”

The “John the Baptist” World

… their poverty is the source of nearly all the plastic pollution in the ocean. Their condition and the ocean’s will be miraculously transformed when they receive reliable energy, modern agriculture, sanitary waste systems, plastics, and the rest of what we now enjoy.

“We welcome this landmark study highlighting how the circular economy can help achieve a nature-positive future,” wrote the CEO of Nestlé, in one of many supportive blurbs at the beginning of The Big Food Redesign.

The future? Well, not so much . . .

John’s clothes were made of camel’s hair, and he had a leather belt around his waist. His food was locusts and wild honey. —Matthew 3: 4

Nobody on modern Earth should live like this. Some still do. As noted earlier, their poverty is the source of nearly all the plastic pollution in the ocean. Their condition and the ocean’s will be miraculously transformed when they receive reliable energy, modern agriculture, sanitary waste systems, plastics, and the rest of what we now enjoy.

In addition to modern fertilizers and high-yield agriculture (two other modern miracles the reliably risible Ellen MacArthur Foundation recommends moving away from), billions in the wealthy world owe our low-cost, high-quality diets to our use of plastic, an extraordinarily efficient necessity.

It preserves fresh meats and produce so they can be shipped to us without spoilage across several time zones, even oceans. Polystyrene keeps prepared foods at the proper temperature and packaged items fresh for weeks, even months. PET bottles provide cheap luxury beverages at the best of times and save lives when natural disasters knock freshwater systems offline.

A lot of these plastics end up in sanitary waste disposal systems because they are so inexpensive to produce in the first place. That’s a feature, not a bug. We live and eat as well as we do because we can afford the cheap plastic that makes it all happen and the sanitary infrastructure to dispose of it where it does no harm. Food production consumes enormous resources—a critical investment that plastic packaging protects at a trivial cost.

That’s conservation. Replace that advantage with something more expensive, and we’ll all be living poorer lives, and those in the ‘John the Baptist’ world may never catch up.

In a perfect world, there would be no trash. But there would also be no sickness, disease, or death. Adulting is hard. In the world we have, we do our best to mitigate all these negatives yet accept each as inevitable.

Learning better ways to dispose of items, and keep some things out of landfills, has also been an inevitable evolution. We will continue to get better at it – we always do. But some things, eventually and inevitably, will always have their value fall to zero and need to be thrown away. Almost every hunk of plastic that finally hits a landfill has done disproportionately more benefit than the trivial space it takes up.

The circular economy for plastic being promoted by Nestlé, Unilever, Coke, and the other corporate partners of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation is not leading us to the promised land of an “economic system that delivers better outcomes for people, and the environment.”

That’s happening with the system we already have.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-ellen-macarthur-foundations-war-on-plastic-and-prosperity/