Plastic Waste During The Time Of COVID-19


“The unprecedented plastic waste tide plaguing our oceans and shores, can become as limited as our chosen relationship with plastics, which involves a dramatic behavioral change on our part…”
Photo and captions source: © SAF — Coastal Care.

Excerpts;

Concern about safety and cross-contamination has caused statewide, municipal, and corporate repeals of single-use plastic bans and this has translated into a heightened demand for bottled water, PPE, plastic bags and packaging. And since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, many grocery stores have forbidden shoppers from bringing their own reusable bags and are handing out single-use plastic bags instead.

But results of an experiment recently published in The New England Journal of Medicine indicate that the coronavirus might actually persist longer on plastics than on other materials…

Read Full Article, Forbes (04-25-2020)

Yet Another Consequence of the Pandemic: More Plastic Waste; WIRED (04-13-2020)

Recycling takes a hit in coronavirus California as plastic waste piles up; San Francisco Chronicle (04-20-2020)

Nestlé is spending billions to create a market for recycled plastics; CNN (01-16-2020)

U.S. companies use misleading “recyclable” labels on hundreds of plastic products; Greenpeace (02-18-2020)

America’s ‘recycled’ plastic waste is clogging landfills, survey finds; Guardian UK (02-18-2020)
Many plastic items that Americans put in their recycling bins aren’t being recycled at all, according to a major new survey of hundreds of recycling facilities across the US…

We’re recycling but garbage keeps piling up: What you may not know about the recycling industry; ABC News (11-17-2019)

Plastic pollution: When The Mermaids Cry: The Great Plastic Tide, Coastal Care – ©2009
” Plastic is versatile, lightweight, flexible, moisture resistant, strong, and relatively inexpensive. Those are the attractive qualities that lead us, around the world, to such a voracious appetite and over-consumption of plastic goods. However, durable and very slow to degrade, plastic materials that are used in the production of so many products all, ultimately, become waste with staying power. Our tremendous attraction to plastic, coupled with an undeniable behavioral propensity of increasingly over-consuming, discarding, littering and thus polluting, has become a combination of lethal nature…”

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