Americans, asked to imagine they were an item in a recycling bin, had to describe what happens to them next. In the range of responses to a March poll, 15% of those polled took the pessimistic route and said, “I go to a landfill.”
With plastic packaging, the issue is particularly acute. The U.S. generates more plastic waste than any other country, but hasn’t managed to create the well-functioning recycling systems some other nations enjoy. Only about 30% of the readily recyclable rigid bottles and jugs that are consumed in the U.S. are successfully recycled, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s latest data from 2018.
“How is it that we can put a man or a woman on the moon, and yet we still don’t know how to recycle properly?” asked Mitch Hedlund, executive director of the nonprofit Recycle Across America.
There are a few knotty problems to sort out before packaging waste can be recycled well in this country, and local governments and non-profits are invested in the solutions because plastic has a long life — about 400 years — and scientists are finding that what we throw out has a way of coming back to us. When plastic goes into landfills it winds up polluting the oceans and the microplastics can find their way into our water supplies and our bodies. We physically consume about a credit card’s worth of plastic per week, studies suggest.
They aren’t Green enough for Dumocrats