We can do better than plastic. Our world does not need this global stressor.
Ocean Plastic
Litter
Plastic is light weight. It goes everywhere people go, even places where people cannot dispose of it. Some folks will leave it, intentionally or not, where they use it to never be thought of again. Single-use plastic is designed to be littered. They make more of it than our waste systems can handle. You will never be able to clean up litter fast enough to get it off the streets. Litter is the most visible symptom of the plastic crisis, but it is just the tip of the ice(trash)berg.
Hundreds of thousand of marine lives are lost annually to plastic pollution in the ocean. The US has to close beaches 20,000 times a year due to pollution and contamination. The microplastic gyres are becoming a new alien ecology swirling in the oceans. Plastics flow downstream.
Greenhouse Gases
About 1.6 billion tonnes of CO2e is emitted annually (in 2019) from production of plastic. This represents more than 3% of total global emissions. Global plastic production in on track to double by 2050. Many single-use plastic serve no function in modern society.
Reuse in the 4Rs
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and Rot. These climate solutions are not all equal. Source reduction is the most upstream, but some things, like school meals, we do not want to limit. Recycling has been found to be woefully inadequate to deal with the single-use packaging. So-called “compostable” packaging is everything but. Sometimes it is good to learn from the past. Reuse used to be the norm for every meal. We need to start moving towards that as the goal.