"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."
"The commonly quoted statistic is that the majority, about 80 percent, comes from land. It gets washed by runoff or blown by wind into the ocean or into waterways that lead to the ocean. The rest, about 20 percent, comes from catastrophic events or maritime sources, much of it fishing gear. In my work, I focus on municipal solid waste and poor design of trash receptacles, collection vehicles and landfills, especially in rapidly developing economies where waste management is lagging. Deliberately tossing litter or open dumping and burning trash is a part of human nature and how we’ve historically managed waste. But some cultures still do it."
"That wasn’t a problem for the oceans until plastics came on board. If you throw out metal or glass or burn paper, that’s one thing. But plastics are persistent synthetic polymers that can last for centuries. The steep, steep increase of production of plastics, 620 percent in the last 40 years, has completely changed our waste stream."
"By keeping non-biodegradable substances such as plastic out of landfills, most recyclers believe they are doing the environment a favor. Why just dump it when it can be reused? Trouble is, much of it isn’t reused. It is dumped in landfills. That is why so many recycling programs lose money and have to be subsidized by customers or taxpayers."
"As of Jan. 1, China banned imports of plastic waste. About 45 percent of that material from throughout the world has gone to China for the past quarter-century. Chinese recyclers have used some of the plastics. The rest goes to landfills, and the Chinese are tired of being the world’s dump."
"A few months ago, my partner and I went snorkelling off the coast of Indonesia. We dove off tiny deserted islands and swam in the deep with giant manta rays, but what I remember most vividly about that trip was not the stunning coral or dazzling array of colourful, curious fish; it was the sheer amount of garbage in the water."
"Shopping bags, plastic cups, toothpaste tubes, orange peel, all manner of human debris followed the currents; waves and waves of junk pooling in the shallow waters. In these parts of the reef, the water was cloudy and full of so much microscopic debris that it stung the skin. I remember watching a majestic giant turtle swim through the gloom as my head bumped against an old Coke bottle bobbing on the surface of the water."
All the experts said single-stream recycling was bound to fail.
The politicians didn't pay attention to the experts.
Do you think the politicians now will realize they made a mistake and go back to dual-stream recycling?