Juggling Dynamite

With poor countries now rejecting our mountains of plastic waste, and plastic particles already contaminating water and food systems worldwide, the need to reduce packaging while also producing environmentally friendly plastics is one of the most urgent issues of our time.

While there are many efforts underway, non-petroleum based plastics are still less than 2% of those in use, and many remain chemical, enery and resource intensive while not actually biodegradable.  A lot of people are working on solutions and a team of brothers from California have developed a process they say ticks all of the boxes needed.  See Turning food waste into bio-plastic:

“Full Cycle Bioplastics manufactures polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) bioplastic by using organic and cellulosic waste as the feedstock. We take the waste, put it into a modified digestion unit, let everything break down and accelerate it, so we get a very strong wastewater intermediate. We take that liquid form, feed the fatty acids to bacteria, which convert them into PHA, which is basically micro-fat that can be sculpted into various shapes such as packaging or forks. No petroleum, no chemicals involved. It’s an organic process.

…The brothers’ goal is not to eliminate conventional plastic altogether. For some items that are meant to last long, let’s say medical equipment, or the hard shell of a laptop, you probably don’t want to experiment with compost. But it’s especially absurd to use a material that does not disintegrate for hundreds of years for things we discard quickly, such as packaging, plastic bags, and single-use cutlery. Roughly half of our plastic production is for single-use items – and less than a quarter of them get recycled.

Over the past decade, developers and investors noted that Vancouver casino revenues grew handsomely while most other casino areas had flat-lined.  Then, in 2018, after years of accepting suitcases and hockey bags full of cash without questions, a new focus on Canada’s anti-money laundering laws have not surprisingly spoiled the party in British Columbia.  See Vancouver’s once rollicking casinos hit by ‘dirty money’ crackdown:

The [Great Canadian Gaming] company reported last month that table drop — the amount of money patrons used at tables to buy chips — fell 16 percent in 2018 to C$298 million at its 10 properties in British Columbia, driven by a decline at River Rock. Revenue from British Columbia also dipped 3 percent due in part to the new source-of-funds procedures, it said.

Recent enforcement of laws requiring disclosure of the source of cash coming into casinos prompted Las Vegas-based developer and operator Paragon Gaming Holding Co. to abandon its interest in the newest Vancouver property Parq Resort, selling its interest to Ottawa-based private realty company PBC Group.  Other investors include Canada’s Dundee Corp.  Now that revenues are down, refinancing of debt has become a problem and S&P has warned of default probability within the year.

Dundee has said it’s seeking to bring in a new partner to Parq by Tuesday. All told, investors had pumped more than C$1 billion in long-term debt and equity into Parq by the end of 2018, according to filings. Dundee, which put in C$142 million of that, has said it doesn’t expect to fully recover its investment and that it could take another year or two before Parq is closer to stable operations.

Reforms must start with drastically curtailing the use and availability of single-use packaging.  Bans on what cannot be collected and reused are necessary to drive the changes needed in the corporate sector.  See Is Canada’s recycling industry broken.

Canada’s recycling industry is having its moment of reckoning with more going to landfill, less being accepted in the blue bin and the cost of going green soaring. Here is a direct video link.

Also see more sobering facts on this issue in Microplastic contamination is now everywhere.