Single-Use Plastics, Recycling and the Golf Industry
A few months ago I played golf at one of the premiere facilities in the Southwestern US. It’s easily one of the most beautiful courses I’ve ever played and one thing they do to add to their playing experience is provide each golfer free, branded single-use plastic water bottles.
Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, many facilities have stopped putting out five gallon water jugs in an effort to decrease the spread of the disease. This means many golf courses have left their patrons to fend for themselves by either buying single-use water bottles from the course or filling reusable bottles at refill stations in or around the clubhouse, if they are even available. In some cases, like my example, high-end golf facilities provide plastic water bottles for their members and guests, a practice in place long before the pandemic.
After my round was over, I got to thinking about those single-use branded water bottles and the following questions came to mind:
Is there a market for branded single-use canned or boxed water to replace single-use plastic water bottles? What are the costs and benefits and are there any negative ramifications?
If so, would ending the reliance on single-use branded water bottles even make a difference in the amount of plastic produced, consumed and discarded everyday at golf courses?
Do most golfers assume single-use plastic water bottles will be recycled?
Are there other single-use plastic products used by the golf industry that should be phased out first?
What are the long-term implications of plastics on not only the golf industry, but on the enjoyment of the sport, and how can golf be a part of a larger solution to the excess of plastic waste on our planet?
As I dove deeper into these questions, the answers became more convoluted and the need for an in depth exploration of the plastics and recycling industries and their effect on the golf industry, let alone our planet, became more apparent. I turned to my friend Jess Loding at Schupan Sustainability who gave me quite an education on plastics and the recycling industry as a whole.
The Disturbing Truth
Plastic is everywhere and it’s pretty much here forever, at least compared to our mortal bodies. There are very few places on Earth where plastic does not exist. It’s in our water, our food and our bodies. Synthetic plastic contains no naturally occurring molecules. When plastic breaks down, it doesn’t decompose and go away. It just becomes smaller microplastic, similar to mountains becoming grains of sand. Recycling plastic only extends its usable life until it is inevitably deposited in our landfills or worse: our oceans, rivers, mountains, deserts and forests. Each time plastic is reprocessed it becomes a little weaker. To recycle and reuse plastic, we actually have to create more virgin plastic because the properties of it decrease the more times it’s processed. In contrast, an aluminum can never loses its principal properties or strength no matter how many times it is recycled.
To give you an idea on the size of the plastic problem, I want to share some statistics with you. They might scare you, anger you and push you to comprehensively think about the impact plastic has on the health of our environment and our bodies.
From National Geographic:
In just six decades, 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic have been created. Only 9% of that has actually been recycled. For perspective, 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic is equal to 1,220,588,235 male African elephants (there are only 415,000 elephants left on the planet)!
From Healthy Human Life:
Americans buy 29 billion water bottles a year and only 1 in 6 bottles bought are recycled.
The production of bottled water uses 17 million barrels of oil a year, slightly more than it would take to fill one million cars a year with fuel.
It takes almost 2,000 times the energy to manufacture a bottle of water than it does to produce tap water.
It takes 3 times the amount of water in a bottle of water to make it as it does to fill it.
Plastic constitutes 90 percent of all the trash floating in the ocean - approximately 46,000 pieces of plastic per square mile of ocean surface
Up to 50% of plastics placed in recycling bins are sent to the landfill instead of being processed at a recycling facility.
It can take from 400 to 1,000 years for plastics to decompose. That means the first piece of synthetic plastic developed in 1907 still has at minimum 300 more years of existence!
From Plastic Oceans International:
50% of the 300 million tons of plastic we produce each year is for single-use purposes.
In our lifetime, each one of us will ingest approximately 40 pounds of plastic, about one lego brick per month.
From Ocean Cleanup:
Have you heard of the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’? This floating amalgamation of garbage is three times the size of France and thus thirty boats, 652 surface nets and two aerial imagery flights were needed to measure its size.
What do we do with all the plastic we’ve ever made and will ever make if it never ‘goes away’? Plastic simply doesn’t die.
Decades ago, we developed a municipal recycling program to process and repurpose recyclable material, but much of the infrastructure of this system is outdated and in disharmony because each recycling plant has different capabilities and processing limitations. The world’s largest purchaser of recyclable material (China) stopped buying recyclables from the United States two years ago, creating a large surplus of material. This has led to increased landfill rates for recyclable material, lower commodity price points in the recyclables marketplace and a burden on the system's current infrastructure.
Once again, plastic doesn’t just go away. The established system was created to repurpose the material and extend its usefulness, not to return it to the earth. So, that begs the next question: Where do we go from here?
Where Do We and the Golf Industry Go From Here?
As golfers, and as an industry, we have an opportunity to educate ourselves on the issue of plastics and take action to do something about it. Becoming more informed can help us change our daily habits by building awareness of the products we buy and use every day.
It can help us become the agents of change in our personal and professional networks, like starting a recycling or composting program at your local golf course or home or office.
It can inspire our social and political activity towards supporting legislation that bans single-use plastics, like straws, styrofoam containers and plastic grocery bags.
We can use it to research and support nonprofits, charities, and companies that organize trash clean ups or repurpose used products and materials, like Adidas's line of apparel and shoes made from upcycled plastic waste or Flag Bag Golf Co. that repurposes old golf flags into golf bags.
We can use it to buy products made from or packaged in recycled plastic giving strength to our purchasing power and eliminating the production of virgin plastics, like opting for Evian water bottles because of their commitment to a 100% recycled PET water bottle by 2025.
And we can do this in all aspects of our lives, not just at the golf course.
I look forward to sharing aspects and strategies of my journey to divest from plastics. Over the next few newsletters, we will take a multi-part deep dive into our recycling system and our addiction to plastic and the impact this has on the golf industry. We will cover the limitations of our recycling system, an explanation of common recycling definitions and maxims, and insight into the stakeholders and solutions that may help us turn the tide on plastics, and how golf and the sports industry at large can be a part of the solution.
