Berkeley isn’t just attacking plastic waste, it’s rejecting our entire throwaway culture

A man fills a disposable cup with water in Berkeley, Calif. on Jan. 23. (Ben Margot / Associated Press) No compatible source was found for this media. Addressing plastic pollution has to focus far more on reducing and reusing. It is simply not a problem we can recycle our way out of. People assume that when they toss plastic packaging into a bin, it will get collected, recycled and finally transformed into another plastic product. This is a convenient fiction, actively promoted by the plastic industry. The reality is that much of the plastic tossed into bins ends up in landfills, or it gets shipped overseas to countries that lack infrastructure to deal with it properly. Plastic was never recycled at a high level, and it’s even worse since 2018, when China closed its doors to imported mixed plastic waste. U.S. recyclers have shifted exports to countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand, but those countries lack the capacity to handle the volume we’re sending, which has brought them new environmental problems. Moreover, despite our willingness to move plastic waste around the world, only about 9% of the plastic ever made has actually been recycled. We just keep […]

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