Counterintuitively, plastic roads increase our dependence on single-use plastics

As the global population increases, the production of plastic does as well, with an average increase of 8.4 percent per year. This has lead to an astonishing amount of garbage collected on land, along the coasts and in oceans — culminating into disasters like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Our high demand for plastics has lead to the production of 322 million tons of plastic in 2015. One solution to alleviate excess plastic trash is to recycle our plastic by reusing it to make plastic roads.

This idea promises more durable and environmentally friendly roads at a lower cost. However, plastic roads can end up being more expensive in the long run with hidden external costs; plastic is not found in nature and threatens the health of our planet by leaching harmful chemicals over time. We are becoming increasingly aware of our daily plastic use and its impact. If we accept plastic roads as a solution to the plastic crisis, we will be regressing on our path to a plastic-free society.

The main problem with plastic roads is the production of plastic that is needed to construct them. The town of Maraimalai Nagar in India adopted the idea of constructing plastic roads to make use of excess plastic, but initially struggled to find the manpower to collect enough plastic. As a solution, the town offered its residents a four-gram gold coin in exchange for collecting 500 kilograms of single-use plastics with a thickness of less than 40 microns. Ironically, Maraimalai Nagar had to abandon the plan a year later since they did not produce enough plastic to keep up with the road production. This plan was flawed from the start since the town was incentivizing the locals to keep producing the single-use plastic that they were originally trying to eliminate.

There is no safe way to handle or discard plastic once it is made. Once produced, plastics will stay on the planet long after we are gone. Plastic roads give the illusion that plastic use is justified. This faulty view will ultimately reverse any progress toward eliminating plastic and will likely increase its production.

The chemical composition of plastic has caused environmental problems long before the concept of plastic roads. Most plastic waste found in the world sheds small fragments through photodegradation—the breakdown of plastic from exposure to elements such as light and heat—eventually finding their way into the environment through soils and waterways. These microplastics act very similar to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which act like magnets and attract all pollutants around them. Microplastics eventually become more polluting and are easily transported throughout many kinds of environments. Organisms can confuse them for food and die from toxic build up.

With plastic roads being a fairly new idea, we don’t yet know how they will hold up to

Mother Nature. Even the process of making plastic roads is highly toxic; the heating of many polymers releases gases such as polypropylene, polystyrene and polyethylene polymers. To create the roads, plastic is mixed with chemical additives to add flexibility and delay degradation due to heat or sunlight, making the plastic fireproof. The workers making these plastic roads are directly at risk of inhaling these chemical toxins. Many developing countries have poor safety practices, and constructing plastic roads in large numbers might expose workers, particularly women, to cancer and hormonal problems.

The price of plastic roads is also a problem, since they can end up costing more than the

alternative, asphalt, especially when external costs are taken into account. The most

widely used material for plastic roads is styrene-butadiene-styrene, which can increase

the price of a road by 30 to 50 percent upfront. This price increase will demoralize many poor

towns that do not have the necessary funds to replace all their roads, and they will have to rely

on government assistance. Even if the price of hidden external costs—such as damage to soil, agriculture, biodiversity, bodies of water, air pollution and public health—was taken into account, no government would implement plastic roads because they aren’t economically feasible.

The solution to plastic pollution is in our hands. We need to reject plastic and start using alternative materials. Our first step must be to stop producing it. By demanding other materials to substitute plastic, the yearly production of plastic worldwide will eventually stop increasing and hopefully stop altogether. As mentioned before, there is no way to safely, inexpensively and sustainably dispose of any plastic. The world is already full of plastic in every ocean, and on every continent. Approximately 5.25 trillion units of plastic pollute us worldwide. We are planet Earth, not Planet Plastic.

Written by: Daniel Oropeza — daoropeza@ucdavis.edu

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by individual columnists belong to the columnists alone and do not necessarily indicate the views and opinions held by The California Aggie.

California has the worst air quality in the nation — mostly due to nitrogen oxide emissions

Fertilizers for crops have been an achievement that has propelled society forward:  about half the population of Earth is currently fed by the innovation of crop fertilizers.

But the magnitude of this tool also has its implications. Plants can only take in so much nitrogen from the fertilizers, and when that plant reaches its maximum capacity intake for nitrogen, the rest stays in the soil, where it starts polluting our environment and contributing to climate change.

California’s Air Resource Board, the state’s voice on contributions to air pollution, estimates that about 4 percent of California’s nitrogen oxide emissions come from fertilizers. Our energies have been focused on what we thought was the leading cause of nitrogen oxide emissions to the atmosphere: transportation. California implemented the smog-check to control the amount of carbon dioxide coming from vehicles. Yet California has the nation’s worst air quality, according to a 2017 report from the Lung Association.

In 2018 it was discovered how grossly miscalculated the actual damage nitrogen oxide emissions from fertilizers actually contribute to air pollution. A recent study from UC Davis shows that up to 41 percent of nitrogen oxide emissions come from overused fertilizer in soils. The Central Valley, which produces one third of the country’s vegetables and two thirds of its fruits, has the highest amount of air pollution in all of California. Central Valley’s bowl-like topography along with its hot dry climate is a recipe for disaster for its residents. It’s no surprise that cities like Fresno have 70,000 residents with asthma.

The World Health Organization estimates that air pollution causes one in eight premature deaths and is associated with increased risk of asthma, cancer and birth defects. Unfortunately, nitrogen oxide emissions are not just detrimental to our health, but to climate change as well. Nitrogen oxide is a greenhouse gas, and like any other, it makes the Earth warmer and therefore causes climate change. Nitrogen oxide also reacts in the air to produce ozone pollution, another greenhouse gas that is toxic for humans and the environment.

The problem of nitrogen oxide can be easily solved now that we know where it really comes from. Just like we focused our attention on cars when we thought they were the leading cause of nitrogen oxide pollution, we must now turn our attention to farmers using nitrogen fertilizers. The good news is that this is a very easy fix. A simple program that incentivises farmers to use fertilizer more sustainably and efficiently will help them save money by using the right amount of fertilizer and it would help reduce pollution to the environment, thereby mitigating the effects of global warming.

Such a program will reward those farmers who use fertilizer most efficiently, thereby creating a healthy competition between farmers to apply fertilizer adequately. This will shape the culture of farming in a more sustainable way by instilling proper techniques and can create new jobs since farmers will need soil technicians to help them measure the right amounts of fertilizer needed for every crop.

By implementing these incentive programs, the free market could also jump in to develop new technologies that can help farmers use fertilizer more efficiently, such as controlled fertilizer drip irrigation systems like the ones currently used for watering crops. More controlled, natural depositions of fertilizer have proven to improve the intake of fertilizer from plants. Innovations can also come in the form of green infrastructure projects to prevent nitrogen runoff or catalytic converters that take out extra nitrogen from the soils. Currently, California loses tens of billions of dollars every year in health-related costs of air pollution. When this problem is resolved, California’s economy could be stronger than ever before.

Written by: Daniel Oropeza — daoropeza@ucdavis.edu

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by individual columnists belong to the columnists alone and do not necessarily indicate the views and opinions held by The California Aggie.

Why Carlin’s jokes work and why today’s PC police might crucify him regardless

Benjamin Porter — bbporter@ucdavis.edu

As one of my high school English teachers always said: “Technique is content.” For this reason, I think it’s essential for comedians to justify every stylistic choice they make. Too many comedians today are excessively profane, vulgar and mean-spirited for no reason whatsoever. Political incorrectness just for the sake of political incorrectness serves absolutely no purpose, and it’s not funny.

This is a symptom of how American culture has been dumbed-down to the point where some less-talented comedians who aren’t smart enough to write good material can get away with decorating their substandard ideas with flashy language. It’s analogous to how mediocre soccer players think that they can get away with playing poorly just because they have tattoos, neon pink boots and a blue stripe in their hair.

In his prime, legendary comedian George Carlin didn’t have much hair left, and his routines often were profane, vulgar and a bit mean-spirited. Yet Carlin is one of my all-time favorite comedians because his profane, politically-incorrect language is indeed a motivated aesthetic choice. My favorite Carlin routines can be boiled down to one main thing: calling out narcissism, hypocrisy, bullshit and people who are stuffed with all three. Frequently, his jokes are just factual descriptions of absurd, ludicrous or just flat-out stupid things that some group of people is doing, and the punchline is just some vulgar variation of Carlin telling them what they should do. You know what I mean.

But his style worked because his foul language is a technique that helped communicate his anger to the audience, who could share in his astonishment at absurd stupidities. The targets of his jokes were always obvious, and there was always an undeniable truth at the core of the joke. On rare occasions, his jokes could go too far, but Carlin was at his brilliant best when he was using “offensive” language and highly exaggerated premises to mercilessly eviscerate those who were begging for it.

For example, Carlin has a 20-minute routine called “a list of people who oughta be killed.” To assure those who can’t get past the potential poor taste of that premise, he is not literally advocating violence. This is just a technique for showing his disgust with various breeds of shallow narcissists and hypocrites. He begins each entry in the list with an absurd way in which “they should be killed.” In one entry, Carlin says:

“Here’s another pack of low-grade morons who oughta be locked in portable toilets and set on fire: These people with bumper stickers that say, ‘We are the proud parents of an honors student at the Franklin school’ — or the Midvale Academy or whatever other innocent sounding name has been assigned to the indoctrination center where their child has been sent to be stripped of his individuality and turned into an obedient, soul-dead conformist member of the American consumer culture.”

While there is no profanity in this rant, it is one of Carlin’s trademark uses of language  — long, rhythmic rhyming lists and endless progressions of “unnecessary” qualifiers. Jon Stewart told Carlin that his “fascination with language is so apparent” and that watching him “is almost like watching a musician, the way you weave words and use language for emphasis.” This is clearly evident in the bumper sticker rant, as well as in a bit called “advertising,” where he goes on a three-minute riff reciting dozens of meaningless marketing slogans to which our “consumer culture” has numbed us.

Carlin died in 2008, with a sharp rise in PC culture just around the corner. In a bit on politically correct language, Carlin discussed how terms like “shell shock” became grotesque, lifeless and “sanitized” jargon like “post-traumatic stress disorder.” He also explains how we’ve arrived at terms like “differently abled,” “minimally exceptional,” “physically challenged” and “handicapable.” The phrase “poor people live in slums” became “the economically disadvantaged occupy substandard housing in the inner cities.” Carlin says that all this ugly language makes him want to vomit, or in other words, “engage in an involuntary personal protein spill.”

Carlin’s goal here is to call out the ridiculousness of people who think that “by changing the name of the condition, you change the condition,” as well as those who try to police language by imparting a sense of shame on any words that might offend some subsection of some group. Had he lived to 2019, Carlin would have had a field day with the amount of new material on this subject, and it likely would have gotten him in much more trouble today.

I fear that even the routines in which he utilizes his techniques perfectly may not have made it past today’s more gung-ho PC police, as too many people would be unable to look past his irreverent style and see the substance of his jokes or artistic use of the English language. A 2015 Washington Post article suggested that even though Carlin loved working out material on college campuses, he wouldn’t even be welcome on them today. Can’t we make fun of people without worrying about the most sensitive person in the room?

Carlin was a proud, non-voting “spectator” of American society, “divested” from the outcome and resigned to the notion that we can’t solve environmental degradation or corruption in the mainstream political establishment. Because of this, I worry that pro-Trump Americans might have hijacked Carlin’s unique brand of cynicism and distrust in authority to fuel their own questionable narratives about Donald Trump being some sort of hero fighting against the “Deep State.” Carlin was not shy about sharing his view that U.S. elections are just a sham, a charade, an “illusion of choice.” It’s possible that today he and his fans would have enjoyed watching Trump shake things up, regardless of the consequences.

In Trump’s America, Carlin would have had difficulty reconciling his love of spectating with his hatred of bullshit. He might have loved Trump as an agent of chaos, or hated him as an agent of bullshit who disrespects the arts of rhetoric, language and logic that Carlin held in such esteem. I’d like to think the latter.

Written by: Benjamin Porter — bbporter@ucdavis.edu

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by individual columnists belong to the columnists alone and do not necessarily indicate the views and opinions held by The California Aggie.