Plastics and our Future

Kudos to National Geographic for its stunner of an issue on plastics and the environmental harms they cause. As this latest report and many other recent stories make clear, we are drowning in plastics. Bits of plastic have been found in beer, in major brands of bottled water, in 75% of deep sea fish, in the soils of the Swiss mountains, and at the bottom of the deepest ocean trench on Earth. We make ungodly amounts of plastic each year and then toss it, mostly without care, so that it makes its way to our rivers and oceans. Even when we try to dispose of it responsibly or biodegrade it, we largely fail. For the most part, we are stuck with the plastic we make for a very, very long time. The problem is accelerating. As the NatGeo story highlights, “[p]roduction has grown at such a breakneck pace that virtually half the plastic ever manufactured has been made in the past 15 years.” Most of that production creates single-use plastic, the detritus of food wrapping and…

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