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 Fall
2003 |
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New plastic resins developed during World War II were put to vital and innovative uses in agriculture almost immediately. “The postwar 1950s and ’60s saw an explosion in revolutionary farming techniques involving mulch films, drip irrigation tapes, and plastic pots replacing clay pots,” says horticulturist Bill Lamont. “The result was increased productivity and savings in time, effort, and money for farmers, consumers, and home gardeners.” The many varieties of plastic have found uses in nearly all types of agriculture. Film plastics are used as mulches and row and greenhouse covers, as well as fumigation film, silage bags, and wraps. Rigid plastics are almost indispensable as nursery pots, trays and flats, trickle irrigation tubing, and pesticide containers. The grand total for U.S. production of ag plastics in the United States alone is estimated at well over 600 million pounds annually, says agricultural engineer James Garthe. He cites a recent waste audit conducted with help from the Lancaster County Solid Waste Management Authority. Using the best available data from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture and the Pennsylvania Nursery and Landscape Association, it estimates total statewide usage of rigid horticultural plastics alone to be over 12.5 million pounds per year. “The agricultural industry uses plastic so much that there’s a name for its use in agriculture: plasticulture,” says Garthe. “Plasticulture is a multi-billion dollar industry worldwide, but traditional solid waste rules limit options for managing these bulky, dirty plastics, which may have pesticide residues on them. As a result, these materials often end up being disposed of on-site by open burning or dumping—practices that are rapidly becoming environmental liabilities.” Garthe says disposing of plastics is a worldwide concern, because farmers around the planet are accumulating plastic on farms, feedlots, and nurseries. Just about any farming operation using modern techniques also has plastics piling up. “If you visit almost any country in the world, you’ll find piles of plastic waste that farmers are saving, waiting for someone to tell them what to do with it,” he says. “It’s not a problem for the average consumer, because they don’t see the piles of plastic film in the back forty or in the sinkholes; it’s a problem for the people who are using it and the industries that are selling it.” Lamont concedes that ag plastics, while unsightly, don’t pose a health or safety problem to farmland. Beyond killing the grass upon which they sit, he says, there’s no damage from the plastics themselves: they’ll be stable, long-lasting eyesores. “It’s just accumulating, more than anything,” he says. “In some areas, the plastic just keeps building up, a valuable resource that we’re not utilizing. It may have been used already as drip tape or plastic mulch, but it still has a lot of energy value to it, and we’re not capturing or making use of that value. We also can consider ag plastics as visual or aesthetic pollution. In this country and overseas, you can see a lot of plastic just lying around. Israel was one of the biggest offenders. In places like India, where they already have tremendous pollution problems, it’s one reason Indian farmers have been hesitant to embrace ag plastics. In Mexico, I’ve seen piles of the residue from open-field burning of plastics, like molten lava. “Farmers have been stewards of the land and are accustomed to recycling crop and animal wastes back into the soil to become nutrients for further growth,” Lamont says. “Typically the farmer is used to managing steel and glass waste properly. Now, here comes plastic, which they can’t incorporate back into the soil like crop wastes, and that becomes a liability to them.” Other industries have plastic waste to deal with, but ag plastics have unique problems. “These plastics are dirtier than recycled household plastic containers, with soil and plant materials that have to be removed before they can be recycled,” Lamont explains. “To recycle them, you would have to wash them and take other energy-intensive steps before they could be made into another pot or something else. “They could hire someone to haul it away just like other businesses do, but they’d have to cover the cost and they’re hesitant to do that,” he says. “It doesn’t cost them a penny to burn it or discard it someplace on their farm. However, as more and more farmers need to consider their nonfarm neighbors, they’re looking for alternatives to open burning, which creates air pollution, or dumping it on the farm, which can create water quality problems.” |
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