May 27, 2021
Last May 25 was ‘International Plastic Free Day’. The organizers of the movement said that if every person in the world stopped using one single-use piece of plastic for one day, we’d avoid over 7.6 billion items of plastic on that single day. The action is laudable. Solving the plastic problem needs the cooperation of all. However, the lasting solution to this problem is to ‘nip it in the bud’. That is to target the source - the plastic producers.
This is the direction that the United States (US) wants to take. This is good because they are a major plastic producer. More than 350 million metric tons of plastic are produced in the US each year, of which 91 percent is not recycled. The U.S. generates the most plastic waste per capita of any country and exports 225 shipping containers of plastic waste per day to countries with limited or nonexistent waste management systems, where plastic may be crudely processed in unsafe facilities and ....