‘Death to the Living: Long Live Trash,’ is an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum organized and created by Duke Riley, a Brooklyn-based artist who uses pieces of plastic found at sea and on beaches. His art includes his own twist of scrimshaw, a craft done by whalers carving on whale bones and making fishing lures from many everyday plastic objects from tooth brushes to utensils to mini bubble wands and many more items. He also made wall hangings out of plastic utensils, bread bag holders, bottle caps, small bags, lighters, plastic tampon applicators, and straws, mixed in with beads, sea shells, cigarette buds and more trash to make beautiful murals. While I call them beautiful, they are also very sad to look at because of all of the plastic that was found on beaches.

This exhibit makes me wonder if I could have indirectly contributed to these murals because of my plastic usage. It made me reflect on all the plastic I use and how simple changes can help me contribute to the solution. I encourage people to go see the exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum by April 3, 2023. Also, I encourage people to think about some ways that what they do with their waste effects items way beyond what we might see or know.

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We went on a tour of the Sims Municipal Recycling Center located in Brooklyn NYC which is a Materials Recovery Facility or MRF. In simple terms, they take recyclable materials from our green and blue recycling bins and sort them into bales and sell them to companies that use the materials like glass, metal, cardboard/paper and plastic to turn them into more products. If you’re wondering how the NYC recycling process works, it’s fairly simple. Homes have access to 3 or 4 bins: black bins for landfill trash, green for paper and cardboard goods, and a blue one for metals, glass bottles, cans, hard plastic, and cartons. Some buildings have access to a brown bin which is for food scraps to compost.

Guiding us through the facility was Karen Napolitano, the education and outreach coordinator at SIMS Recycling Center. After walking through their learning center, she told us about recycling and sorting through the facility and how metal, glass, cardboard/paper, and plastic. Surprisingly, anything that is 50% or more metal can be recycled, delicate glass like light bulb glass can’t be recycled even though housing and car glass can, greasy pizza boxes can be recycled, and only rigid plastics can be recycled. Plastic wrap, plastic bags, and other thin and filmy plastic coming from NYC is usually incinerated because that is one of the only ways to get rid of it. She also told us about how different materials are sorted when they are heaped into two bins (blue & green), showed us the sorting machine (image above) and how it had a complex array of near-infrared sensors, filters, air jets, conveyor belts, and more to make this facility run 24/6.

One important distinction was the differences between the many types of plastic and that only a few can be recycled by their facility. We learned that the statistics that only 5-6% of plastic is recycled is only accurate when you have context. When an EPA study was conducted, they calculated that about 9% of all plastic produced including plastic items like toilet seats, printers, tables, insulation, etc. These are items that are used for more than one year, and are being factored in. But, the percentage of single-use plastic that was recycled vs. thrown into landfills or incinerated isn’t known because there is no good way of collecting data on how much plastic companies use, we can only guess. Learning about the inner workings of this facility taught me how complex recycling is. As much as I recycle, learning how low the percentage of items recycled overall makes me wonder if people would care more if they could visit this facility.

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My group and I interviewed Erica Cirino who is the Communications Manager at Plastic Pollution Coalition (PPC). She and her team work with 1000+ different organizations and businesses around the globe to lower our plastic consumption. During our interview, we learned some shocking facts about plastic and how we can work together to help combat this ever growing problem. She gave us some new and interesting information relating to what PPC does and how they’ve been very successful. One thing I learned is that micro and nano-plastics are everywhere including in humans and that we eat plastics involuntarily which was kind of scary and also sad. This is also the case for lots of marine animals like whales that take in a lot of water with fish, with plastic in it and then digest plastics involuntarily and unknowingly. During the interview, we found out that PPC is partnered with a few organizations here in NYC and one of them helps schools get rid of single use plastics like utensils and other items. She stated that we need to find alternatives to recycling in the world because many types of plastics can’t be recycled. In the US, only 5-6% of recycled items are actually recycled. It would be better if the plastic recycling percentage was higher, however the plastic production and consumption needs to be lowered or as Erica put it, “We need to turn off the tap of plastic production.” Despite the numbers being grim, Erica was optimistic that we as the human race can turn this problem around.

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I attended a webinar with the Plastic Pollution Coalition on the topic of microfibers. The webinar discussed where and how microfibers are formed. Micro and nano fibers can be traced back to many sources. A few big sources are tire marks, degrading plastic on land and in the sea. Studies have found that most plastic water bottle companies have hundreds, sometimes thousands of pieces of nano plastic in all plastic water bottles. For nano fibers, one of the biggest contributors are washing machines. Their filters aren’t fine enough to catch the majority of microfibers and they leech into sewers and then eventually end up in estuaries or even the ocean. Fortunately, a company called Planet Care has made washing machine filters that collect up to 90% of microfibers. These microfibers are thrown into landfills to properly dispose of them instead of having them float in water for animals to consume them. Also, more than 50% of clothing is made with some kind of plastic material. It would be better to use other materials than plastic to help to lower the production and consumption of plastics.

After listening to the webinar, one of the many takeaways is that my household must create many pounds of microfibers over the course of a year contributing to microplastics in the environment. It also makes me more interested in purchasing clothing made from natural fibers vs. synthetics/plastic. If we all can make little changes, we can be part of the solution.

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