Hate to be a downer on a Friday, but most of the plastic we use never gets recycled.
Yes, even the items we carefully sort and send off in blue bins mostly ends up in landfills and our water systems. Most containers are manufactured with mixed formulas that cannot be efficiently separated, so they are not.
For a long time, China was accepting our waste and stockpiling it there. This was always a lazy ‘out of sight, out of mind’ effort on our part, enabling the unsustainable to continue far longer than it should. Fortunately, on January 1, China stopped accepting 24 types of waste and recycling items like plastic and paper from overseas. Now the waste is piling up all over the place, and it will be harder and harder to ignore.
The solution is to drastically reduce our use of plastic, and to require goods’ producers to only make and use packaging which can be reused or easily biodegraded.
Plastic pollution is not going to solve itself. We all need to take personal responsibility for reducing our use by finding other more efficient options and ideas, and that starts with avoiding plastic packaging in the first place.
The best way I have found to reduce packaging in my own life, is to make things from scratch at home and bring them with us when we leave the house in reusable containers. You also tend to get higher quality contents that way, for much less cost.
Products that are labelled as eco-friendly, healthy or about ‘nature balance’ are oxymoronic when sold in plastic packaging. Conscience has to extend beyond the contents, if the brand is to be authentic.
This video offers a good reminder of why and how to make smarter choices.
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