Wednesday, September 18, 2019

COTW: A Mountain of Plastic

This graphic compares one month's amount of plastic bottle waste to a well known monument:
credit: Reuters
One can see that the scale of the waste stream is enormous.  Although there are effort to recycle plastic bottles, the world is literally drowning in single use plastic.  Only six percent of the plastic waste stream is recycled as shown in this chart:


Canada and the EU are set to ban certain single-use plastics by 2021. Sixty other nations are enacting similar laws, but humanity's use of plastic is on an unsustainable trajectory.