There is so much plastic in the food chain that it’s being ingested all the way up to us. Recyclers are overwhelmed. Foreign countries can’t take anymore, so it just gets dumped into the environment.
But the economy is booming! If all else fails, we can eat money!
Having switched to large bins for trash and recycle, here on the farm, in an effort to curtail payments to the Waste Management moguls, we have made great efforts to separate plastics from metal containers. Now, as it turns out, the bins at the dump are for mixed media, making separation of materials the new job of far-off eastern villages, who are inundated with our unrecycled trash, now that China has refused our shipments.
Small villages we bombed and invaded decades ago are now buried in truck loads of stinking American trash, for which the unwilling villagers are being paid a pittance to separate for us and the proud new owners.
And this is only a small percentage of what actually makes the trip across the Pacific Ocean; much of it being dumped at sea.
So much of human existence is becoming unsustainable. We have become a life-threatening cancer upon our planet and soon, either it dies, or we do. Thoughts and prayers, if you got ’em… I’m out.
Such a simple problem to fix. Plastic is not the issue, it’s our failed economic and political systems that are holding us back. How about this: “You don’t get to manufacture that unless you can handle the material on the return, once it’s no longer useful.” There, I solved the problem.
Our primitive savannah brains are being forced to make too many changes, too fast. It’s making us cranky, stupid, and self-destructive. Our species is failing.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Let’s identify the culprits [they come from all classes and belief systems, btw] in these economic and political systems that need reform, and then hold their feet to the fire. Time to evolve; git ‘er dun!