"Everything we do is like a chess move. Everything is calculated," said Steve Arndt, site manager for American Falconry Services."
"It’s a lie that wasteful consumers cause the problem and that changing our individual habits can fix it"
"Internal studies and other documents show that 3M knew by the 1970s that PFOA and PFOS were toxic and accumulating in people's blood."
"Newly released 2015 data indicates a 34.7% recycling rate for the U.S. The benefits of increasing that rate further are now being framed in terms of job creation rather than greenhouse gas reduction."
"The only thing worse than being lied to is not knowing you’re being lied to. It’s true that plastic pollution is a huge problem, of planetary proportions. And it’s true we could all do more to reduce our plastic footprint. The lie is that blame for the plastic problem is wasteful consumers and that changing our individual habits will fix it."
"Recycling plastic is to saving the Earth what hammering a nail is to halting a falling skyscraper. You struggle to find a place to do it and feel pleased when you succeed. But your effort is wholly inadequate and distracts from the real problem of why the building is collapsing in the first place. The real problem is that single-use plastic—the very idea of producing plastic items like grocery bags, which we use for an average of 12 minutes but can persist in the environment for half a millennium—is an incredibly reckless abuse of technology. Encouraging individuals to recycle more will never solve the problem of a massive production of single-use plastic that should have been avoided in the first place."