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Eve O. Schaub is the author of “Year of No Garbage: Recycling Lies, Plastic Problems, and One Woman’s Trashy Journey to Zero Waste.”
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Software developer at a big library, cyclist, photographer, hiker, reader. Email: chris@improbable.org
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This seems counterintuitive, I know. We’ve been told for decades that the answer to the plastic-waste crisis is more, better recycling: If only we sorted better! If only we had better access to recycling technologies! If only we washed and dried our plastics more adequately! This is all a smokescreen, designed to distract us from the truth that plastic recycling — if by “recycling” we mean converting a used material into a new material of similar value and function — is a myth.
Unlike paper, glass and metal, plastic is not easily, efficiently turned into new products. What passes for “recycling” plastic is costly, energy-intensive and toxic. On top of all that, the process requires the addition of a shocking amount of new virgin plastic — around 70 percent — to hold the newly formed plastic item together. As a result, only about 5 percent of plastic gets “recycled” (or, more accurately, “downcycled” into a product of inferior quality). Compare that with a 68 percent recycling rate for paper and cardboard.
Considering that, as a society, we’ve been actively trying to get better at plastic recycling since the 1970s, 5 percent represents a colossal, unequivocal failure. It tells us that plastic “recycling” is, at heart, an empty, performative gesture.
Many environmentalists will protest this assertion. They might correctly point out that plastics labeled with the resin identification code of 1 or 2 (the number inside the “chasing arrows” triangle on many plastics) have a higher measure of recycling success: about 30 percent. Shouldn’t we support recycling at least this plastic?
For a long time, I thought so.
But this brings us to another myth: that plastic is harmless to human health. What many people do not know is that plastic is made from two ingredients: fossil fuels and toxic chemicals. When we say toxic chemicals, we are talking about some very bad actors: heavy metals, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), flame retardants and persistent organic pollutants. Tens of thousands of proprietary chemical formulas are involved in the production of plastic, most of which have never been tested for their effects on human health, although many are known to be endocrine disruptors, fertility inhibitors and carcinogens.
What this means is that even if we were to get better at recycling plastic, we shouldn’t want to. When you grind up, melt and re-form a bunch of plastic (with the addition of lots of new virgin plastic to bind it together), all those thousands of toxic plastic chemicals combine to make a Frankenstein material that has what scientists call “non-intentionally added substances” in it. Which is to say that chemicals that are not supposed to be there start showing up. A study last year concluded that recycled plastics contain “an unknown number of chemical compounds at unknown concentrations.” In 2021, a Canadian study concluded that plastic is “not suitable for processing into food grade PCR,” referring to post-consumer resin.
The upshot? You do not want your food wrapped in recycled, mystery-ingredient plastic.
But what if we use recycled plastic only for nonfood items such as picnic benches? Then we have yet another deeply troubling aspect of plastic to deal with: microplastics. We’ve been hearing more and more about these lately, because scientists are finding them everywhere they look — in the environment and in the human body.
The chemical composition of all plastic — whatever the type — is a synthetic polymer that doesn’t break down or go away, ever. Instead, it breaks up into smaller and smaller pieces until it turns into microplastics or even nanoplastics. These tiny particles are still plastic, still toxic, but now so small that we are eating and breathing them all the time. Microplastics have been discovered in human lungs, bloodstream and breastmilk, as well as in the placenta of unborn babies. Scientists have found microplastics in sperm, testes and the brain.
The effect of all this plastic in our bodies is still being revealed, but we know it is substantial. A recent study concluded that the disease burden from plastic exposure includes preterm birth, obesity, heart disease and cancer, and the health-care cost was $249 billion in 2018 alone. The human body has become the trash can of our plastics-addicted culture.
Trying to recycle plastic makes the microplastics problem even worse. A study of just one plastics recycling facility discovered that it might be washing 3 million pounds of microplastics into its wastewater every year — all of which ends up being deposited in our city water systems or dumped into the environment.
At this very moment, we all have microplastics coursing through our bodies. This is not the fault of not enough recycling. This is the fault of too much plastic. So I say: Let’s treat plastic like the toxic waste it is and send it where it can hurt people the least.
Right now, that place is the landfill.
Then we need to get to work on the real solution: making a whole lot less of it.
A weekend of important news has quickly overshadowed something striking that led up to it: In just the past few weeks, several House Republicans (none particularly “moderate”) have conceded that their conference is lousy with Russian influence.
On Thursday, Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) admitted that Donald Trump’s enforcers in Congress “want Russia to win so badly that they want to oust the speaker over it.”
Reps. Mike Turner (R-OH) and Michael McCaul (R-TX), who chair the House intelligence and foreign affairs committees respectively, have each accused those same Republicans of mainlining Russian propaganda and echoing it on the floor of the House.
So the secret is out.
It’s on one level a penetrating glimpse into the obvious—Republican affinity for Russia and Vladimir Putin has been undisguised and growing since Trump took over the party years ago. On another level it’s satisfying: A pincer movement of MAGA loyalists and left-wing critics of the Democratic Party has spent years mocking liberals over their supposed obsession with Russia, only for a group of somewhat-less-deranged Republicans to admit the truth quite openly.
Hostilities between the two GOP factions boiled over Saturday when the House finally passed legislation that will provide $61 billion in military aid to Ukraine, after MAGA—and its handpicked speaker, Mike Johnson—starved Kyiv for more than half a year on Trump’s orders. In the wake of that development, liberals and Democrats have praised Johnson (some more reluctantly than others) for having an open mind and ultimately doing the right thing, though his speakership was at risk. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine even singled out Johnson publicly for a note of personal thanks.
I understand the collective sense of relief. But I’m also left feeling like we’ve agreed to conceal the elephant in the room with little more than a knowing nod. Why’d Johnson ultimately abandon the Russia-loyalists in his conference, and does he agree with Crenshaw, McCaul, Turner et al that his old faction is compromised? If so, what does he, as a leader of his party, plan to do about it? Or does he intend to let this big breach in the U.S. government fester for whatever strategic advantage it may provide the Republican Party.
By way of analogy: If you drain your retirement savings to pay off the mob, but win it all back gambling, on one level it’s no harm no foul. On another level it raises some important questions about who you are!
Obviously getting aid to Ukraine is the most urgent imperative. But at some point soon we should have a conversation about who was doing what since our last tranche of Ukraine aid lapsed months ago, and why they were doing it.
NASA has formally approved the robotic Dragonfly mission for full development, committing to a revolutionary project to explore Saturn's largest moon with a quadcopter drone.
Agency officials announced the outcome of Dragonfly's confirmation review last week. This review is a checkpoint in the lifetime of most NASA projects and marks the moment when the agency formally commits to the final design, construction, and launch of a space mission. The outcome of each mission's confirmation review typically establishes a budgetary and schedule commitment.
“Dragonfly is a spectacular science mission with broad community interest, and we are excited to take the next steps on this mission," said Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA's science mission directorate. "Exploring Titan will push the boundaries of what we can do with rotorcraft outside of Earth.”
In the case of Dragonfly, NASA confirmed the mission with a total lifecycle cost of $3.35 billion and a launch date of July 2028. That is roughly twice the mission's original proposed cost and a delay of more than two years from when the mission was originally selected in 2019, according to NASA.
Busting the cost cap
Rising costs are not necessarily a surprise on a mission as innovative as Dragonfly. After reaching Titan, the eight-bladed rotorcraft lander will soar from place to place on Saturn's hazy moon, exploring environments rich in organic molecules, the building blocks of life.
Dragonfly will be the first mobile robot explorer to land on any other planetary body besides the Moon and Mars, and only the second flying drone to explore another planet. NASA's Ingenuity helicopter on Mars was the first. Dragonfly will be more than 200 times as massive as Ingenuity and will operate six times farther from Earth.
Despite its distant position in the cold outer Solar System, Titan appears to be reminiscent of the ancient Earth. A shroud of orange haze envelops Saturn's largest moon, and Titan's surface is covered with sand dunes and methane lakes.
Titan's frigid temperatures—hovering near minus 290° Fahrenheit (minus 179° Celsius)—mean water ice behaves like bedrock. NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which flew past Titan numerous times before its mission ended in 2017, discovered weather systems on the hazy moon. Observations from Cassini found evidence for hydrocarbon rains and winds that appear to generate waves in Titan's methane lakes.
Clearly, Titan is an exotic world. Most of what scientists know about Titan comes from measurements collected by Cassini and the European Space Agency's Huygens probe, which Cassini released to land on Titan in 2005. Huygens returned the first pictures from Titan's surface, but it only transmitted data for 72 minutes.
Dragonfly will explore Titan for around three years, flying tens of kilometers about once per month to measure the prebiotic chemistry of Titan's surface, study its soupy atmosphere, and search for biosignatures that could be indications of life. The mission will visit more than 30 locations within Titan's equatorial region, according to a presentation by Elizabeth Turtle, Dragonfly's principal investigator at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
"The Dragonfly mission is an incredible opportunity to explore an ocean world in a way that we have never done before,” Turtle said in a statement. “The team is dedicated and enthusiastic about accomplishing this unprecedented investigation of the complex carbon chemistry that exists on the surface of Titan and the innovative technology bringing this first-of-its-kind space mission to life."
However, this high level of ambition comes at a high cost. NASA selected Dragonfly to proceed into initial development in 2019. Turtle's science team proposed Dragonfly to NASA through the agency's New Frontiers program, which has developed a series of medium-class Solar System exploration missions. The New Frontiers program has an impressive pedigree, beginning with the New Horizons mission that flew by Pluto in 2015, the Juno mission to Jupiter, and the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission.
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Dragonfly's lifecycle cost of $3.35 billion will make it significantly more expensive than any of those missions.
When NASA chose Dragonfly in 2019, the mission had a cost cap of $850 million ($1 billion when adjusted for inflation) to get it to the launch pad. The budget limit didn't include the launch or costs to operate the Dragonfly spacecraft after launch. The costs originally under the budget cap have increased the $1 billion post-inflation figure to $2.1 billion, according to NASA.
Since 2019, NASA had to replan the Dragonfly mission multiple times due to funding constraints that limited how much the agency could spend on the project each fiscal year. Managers navigated the challenges imposed by the pandemic and supply chain issues. There was also an "in-depth design iteration," the agency said in a statement.
During this time, NASA directed managers in charge of Dragonfly to delay its launch from 2026 to 2027, which required the mission to change from a medium-lift to a heavy-lift launcher. As a result of this, NASA upped the funding for Dragonfly to pay for a bigger rocket. Dragonfly's updated launch window in July 2028 will still require a high-energy launch, likely on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy or a United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket. NASA will likely select a launch provider for Dragonfly later this year.
Collectively, these pressures caused Dragonfly's lifecycle cost to grow to $3.35 billion, more in line with a flagship-class interplanetary mission than a cost-capped project. The two most recent New Frontiers missions came in between $1 billion and $1.5 billion, while Europa Clipper, NASA's next flagship planetary science probe, will cost around $5 billion.
NASA's commitment to Dragonfly also comes as the agency faces budget cuts. These reductions have hit the agency's planetary science division particularly hard. NASA is revamping plans for its big planetary flagship mission, Mars Sample Return, to try to rein in growing costs. The agency has postponed a call for scientists to propose concepts for the next New Frontiers mission that will follow Dragonfly.
Despite the higher costs, Dragonfly escaped cancellation. A major reason for this appears to be that NASA's budgetary limitations, and not any mismanagement from within the Dragonfly project, were responsible for a large share of the cost growth.
Assuming a launch in July 2028, Dragonfly will arrive at Titan in December 2034. Cocooned inside a heat shield and aeroshell, Dragonfly will enter Titan's atmosphere and deploy a parachute to slowly descend to the surface over the course of nearly two hours. Then, the quadcopter will settle onto the ground with its fixed landing skids.
At the surface, Titan's atmosphere is four times thicker than Earth's. This makes the process of getting to the ground a lot longer than a lander entering the atmosphere of Earth or Mars, but the higher air density should provide excellent flying conditions.
1 public comment
Not wrong: every cool thing we hear about outcomes is going to be sacrificed on the altar of shareholder value.
“Nurses know that AI technology and algorithms are owned by corporations that are driven by profit — not a desire to improve patient care conditions or advance the nursing profession. The hospital industry, in cooperation with Silicon Valley and Wall Street, will use AI to further its dangerous effort to displace RNs from the physical care of their patients prioritizing low-cost or free labor over patient needs.”
“Nurses know that AI technology and algorithms are owned by corporations that are driven by profit — not a desire to improve patient care conditions or advance the nursing profession. The hospital industry, in cooperation with Silicon Valley and Wall Street, will use AI to further its dangerous effort to displace RNs from the physical care of their patients prioritizing low-cost or free labor over patient needs.”
Washington, DC
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