"President Donald Trump is fighting the wrong fight in his ongoing trade war with the rest of the world. That’s because it’s premised on the old-school notion of the linear economy in which someone in another country, such as China, digs up raw materials and sends them to a factory, where they get turned into the finished product and shipped to the U.S. In exchange, money leaves the U.S. economy and flows to the countries where the product was made – creating the trade deficit Trump despises."
"And here’s the important bit. Americans use the product for a while, throw it away, and it ends up in a dump. And then we buy another import."
"The long-term effect? Our money goes to a foreign economy, and Americans end up with piles of garbage. Then we pay a foreign economy one more time to take the garbage off our hands. China is one country that used to take a lot of our garbage, but India, Pakistan and Nigeria are also big in this business."
"A circular economy, by contrast, starts with the finished product, which can then be recycled domestically and reused, often at a fraction of the cost of manufacturing them new elsewhere. This keeps the money at home, which produces more domestic jobs and wealth. "
"Albany County has been hit with a $5,000 state fine for improper operation of its two aging sewage plant incinerators that date back some two years, according to the state Department of Environmental Conservation. DEC imposed the fine late last month for the violations, which happened in 2016 at inc..."
"Everything we do is like a chess move. Everything is calculated," said Steve Arndt, site manager for American Falconry Services."
"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."