We often put up with bad situations because they stop something worse happening. This can be as big as having nuclear weapons to stop major wars occurring. Paying taxes is a burden but it keeps a society healthy and connected. Not eating so much chocolate seems wrong but will give you better long-term health.
And then we have plastic. Plastic must rank as one of the most successful of human inventions. It can be used in myriads of applications, keeps foods hygienic for longer, and allows more people to have the luxuries of the modern world. Plastic also causes incredible waste and we are still learning about the ongoing and long-lasting impacts that occur from the breakdown of plastics into smaller and smaller molecules.
One of the biggest shifts in day to day life over the last decade or so is the movement away from plastic where possible. Many countries have banned (or are banning) single use plastics. I would doubt that there is anyone unaware of plastics as an issue for our sustainable future.
One of my hobbies is in collecting and playing board games. Historically there has been a lot of plastic in games. Lately, there has been a real effort by gaming companies to make as much as possible from cardboard and wood and to remove stuff like shrink-wrap. (Although I do love me some great detailed plastic miniatures some of the time. I try to add use by painting them. Unfortunately, there is still nothing quite as good for sculpting as plastic. Hopefully that will change (see this approach using mostly wood shavings as a building matrix called re-wood).)
As we have mentioned many times on EcoLincNZ, we do a lot of research on vertebrate pest management, especially in monitoring and detecting mammals, like stoats, deer, possums, hedgehogs (even elephants and leopards). Controlling these pests is vital for conserving New Zealand’s endemic biodiversity. We are very good at doing this and improving all of the time. Unfortunately, we use a lot of plastic.
Our tracking tunnels, chew cards and wax tags all have significant plastic components. Some of these are single use, some can be used a few times, but there are always some that get left in the environment. Also, many of the places that we are interested in monitoring are, by definition, in areas that have low human impacts and very little exposure to plastic. And here we are bringing the plastic there.
Now, you could argue that a few negatives of using a relatively small amount of plastic is far outweighed by the good that using these devices does. And you would be correct. But what if we could have our cake and eat it too?
Katie Pitt is a PhD student at Lincoln University. She and her supervisors, James Ross and Adrian Paterson, have just published a paper in New Zealand Journal of Zoology where they question the use of plastic in wildlife management and ask whether we can do better.
Katie looked at how much plastic is munched up by species, like rats and mice, when they interact with chew cards placed in various habitats. These bits of plastic remain in the rats and then the environment even if the cards are retrieved. The plastic fragments are also much reduced in size by the nibbling and can move around much easier, through wind, rain and rodent stomachs. The removed chew card will also end up in landfills.
Katie found that chew cards in Canterbury and Taranaki typically left 15% of their volume behind in the environment as nibbled bits. Given the scale of monitoring throughout New Zealand this can quickly add up to a lot of plastic in areas that typically have no plastics.
There may be an alternative. Katie tested some new chew cards made from wood pulp, and so fully biodegradable. Of course we don’t want to use a product that is inferior to what we already use, especially for something as important as protecting our biodiversity. Katie tested the use of wood pulp chew cards alongside plastic models. She consistently found that they performed just as well in a range of conditions (including with a lot of rain!). Katie also found that prices per chew card were similar with scope for the wood pulp cards to eventually become cheaper.
Is this a problem that people want to solve? Katie asked individuals from 30 organisations that work in pest monitoring and found that 97% were keen to move away from single-use plastics, as long as there was no major reduction in functionality and cost.
So we have a problem, people want to solve this problem, we have an alternative, and this alternative seems to work as well as what we already have. Eat that cake and have it as well!
There is still a bit of work to do to scale this up to the levels that we need if this is to replace the status quo. Katie is also looking at how we would replace tracking tunnels. But the future is looking bright. And plastic-free.
Adrian Paterson is a lecturer in the Department of Pest-management and Conservation at Lincoln University. As a Twin Peaks fan from way back, he really wanted to use “She’s dead, wrapped in plastic” in this article.
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