World Water Day 2023

 ASHLAND, WIS. – Northland College’s Mary Griggs Burke Center for Freshwater Innovation shared World Water Day with Dr. Sherri Mason, Director of Sustainability at Penn State – Behrend. She has contributed to water science work in the Great Lakes region and its worldwide effect.

Among Mason’s endless compilation of relevant facts was the item an average person uses for only 12 minutes but can impact the rest of their life. The item? A plastic bag.

“The Perils of Plastics,” presented by Mason, provided a gut-wrenching truth and responsibility we have burdened ourselves with. We have created this responsibility to somehow fix our worldwide plastic dilemma.

To comprehend the danger we face with plastics, we need to understand “it starts from the moment that it’s coming out of the ground,” described Mason. Plastic is a synthetic polymer, and it often comes from hydrofracking, a method often associated with natural gas production. Realistically, hydrofracking produces “wet gas” which is not rich in methane, it is rich in ethane. Ethane can then be converted into polyethylene, the main ingredient in plastic.

After coming out of the ground, this wet gas gets transported to a facility called an ethylene cracker plant. One plant along the Ohio River, near Erie, Pennsylvania, just became operational in November 2022. A multibillion-dollar facility whose main purpose is to turn the wet gas into plastic, has already “violated the Clean Air Act 115 times” described a disheartened Mason. Plastic is then shipped to manufacturing plants to be made into plastic products.

Billions of dollars and 115 violations later, you end up with a plastic bag that is used for an insignificant portion of one’s life. After those 12 minutes, plastic often ends up in water and rarely gets recycled. Freshwater systems like the Great Lakes can transport plastic to the more well-known ocean garbage patches.

Because plastic is fully synthetic, it cannot biodegrade, and “nature doesn’t know what to do with it,” said Mason. Instead, it just keeps breaking it into smaller and smaller pieces until it becomes microplastic. Described by Mason as “confetti,” microplastic is 97% of the plastic that pollutes the water we often occupy, drink, and harvest our food in.

But it is certainly no party. “Chemicals can migrate out of plastics” and humans can even “eat a credit card’s worth of plastic a week,” said Mason. This leaching of chemicals into the water that we directly and indirectly consume has been linked to neurological disorders, lower sperm counts, more miscarriages and fertility complications, autism, and even cancer.

But it’s not all bad news, Mason says we can turn down “the tap” and begin to fix our immediate threats of plastic pollution. She goes on to say “we are flooding ourselves,” but “every action you take matters” and “don’t underestimate the power you have as a consumer.”

The power of the consumer to use our 12 minutes for something other than a plastic bag so we keep water the as the clean, common ground we know and love.