Naja Bertolt Jensen, Unsplash
The Cure for Disposable Plastic Crap Is Here—and It’s Loony
Clive Thompson, WIRED Plastics & Pollution
The environmental problem of “single-use plastics” haunts the public imagination like a spectral wolf. And no wonder—the sheer welter of everyday objects we make from plastic is astonishing. There’s plastic in grocery bags, obviously, but also in yoga pants and car tires and building materials and toys and medical products. The transition came on quickly: Plastic use was comparatively small until the 1970s, when it exploded, tripling by the 1990s. Then it went into overdrive, and in the next 20 years we used as much plastic as we had in the previous 40. We now crank out more than 500 million tons of plastic waste a year. Globally, only 9 percent of plastics are recycled. The rest go into landfills or get incinerated, pumping toxic fumes into the air, usually in poor neighborhoods. A significant chunk also ends up in the ocean, which has already amassed as much as 219 million tons of the stuff—wrappers washing up on shorelines, chunks eaten by fish, islands of plastic forming in watery gyres at sea.
Read the full article here.
← Older Post Newer Post →