Being able to send trillions of tons of plastic waste out of sight, by shipping it to landfills in poorer countries, is an unsustainable disaster for our global environment. Meanwhile companies producing the waste are extracting their profits free of any accountability for the massive public costs being inflicted.
It’s good that China is no longer accepting our mess, as this may force more awareness and responsibility on the issue, as toxic waste piles up all around us. The answer is in consumers protesting and refusing to accept products in plastic packaging, along with regulation that will force product producers to stop using packaging that they cannot recycle and reuse.
Nearly four-fifths of all that plastic has been thrown into landfills or the environment. A tenth of it has been burned. Several million tons reach oceans every year, sullying beaches and poisoning vast reaches of the northern Pacific. Just 9 percent of the total plastic ever generated has been recycled. China took in just over half the annual total in 2016, or 7.4 million metric tons. See: China just handed the world a 111 trillion ton trash problem.
Here is a direct video link.
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