For the past three weeks, we’ve been learning about our plastic waste problem—and at the end of it all, it’s easy to feel disheartened. After traveling across the country and moving into my new home, I’m painfully aware of how much plastic waste I’ve piled up along the way.
Knowing that my personal plastic footprint is an almost insignificant fraction of the 300 million metric tons of plastic waste we generate annually only makes the problem feel even more insurmountable.
One question has stuck in my mind this past month: What’s the solution? How can we turn the tide of plastic waste into clean oceans and healthier lives?
In an ideal world, we could stop using plastic altogether. This would avoid the negative health and environmental justice consequences of plastic production, and give us the chance to clean up and properly dispose of our discarded plastic waste.
This would, however, ignore the essential benefits plastic provides, such as keeping medical and food preparation environments sanitary. I haven’t found a magic fix yet — but here are a few actions you can take to help us reduce our unnecessary plastic waste:
Seek out alternatives to single-use plastic.
Instead of accepting single-use plastic utensils, cups, or straws, bring your own with you — whether they’re made of wood, glass, silicone, or reusable (maybe even recycled) plastic. Doing so will help you cut down the amount of plastic waste you generate, and in the future, it may make the transition to a culture of reusables (instead of disposables) that much easier.
Biodegradable plastic alternatives are also a budding industry and a promising area of research. Bioplastics, for example, include plastics made from corn and from microorganisms. Because bioplastics are biodegradable, their individual molecules can return to the environment, where living organisms can reuse them. Plus, bioplastic production emits significantly less carbon dioxide than traditional plastics.
Bioplastics, however, come with their own set of issues. They take up space on increasingly valuable agricultural land, contaminate traditional plastic recycling systems, and in some cases can only biodegrade in special facilities, not in nature. The challenge for the future will be to balance these competing environmental concerns and determine the least harmful path forward.
Support improvements to our plastic recycling systems.
As we learned about in this month’s second Impactfull article, plastic is hard to recycle. In the United States, we rely on a single-stream system that places the burden of sorting recyclable products (plastic, glass, metal, and paper) on recycling facilities, rather than on consumers. Following China’s 2018 ban on waste imports, plastic recycling became expensive for municipalities, and thus an unattractive option. Recycled plastic is more expensive and lower-quality than brand-new plastic, so there’s little market demand for it. Furthermore, plastic recycling at home creates a lot of confusion: not all plastic products can be recycled (even if they carry the recycling symbol), and items must be cleaned beforehand.
It’s no wonder, then, that the vast majority of our plastic waste goes unrecycled.
In places such as South Korea, Japan, and the EU, recycling rates are much higher. As Katie wrote about last month, South Korea’s waste management system involves strict waste sorting requirements and strategic fees and fines, all of which influence residents to generate less waste and recycle as much as possible.
Of course, these countries have the advantage of different governing structures and smaller populations and areas, making it that much easier to collect and sort plastics for recycling. But you can support local initiatives, such as those aiming to educate the public on proper recycling practices, sort recycled materials better, or create new facilities and better technologies for plastic recycling.
Help out and clean up.
Beaches, parks, streets, or any body of water — you name it, plastic trash will be there. Luckily, there’s a wide variety of organizations working to clean it all up.
State and municipal parks occasionally host trash cleanup events for any volunteers willing to come out and pick up garbage for a few hours. Some, like the park I worked at last summer, may even make a kayaking trip out of it!
Local and international conservation groups also organize cleanup events. Look for opportunities in your local community, or check out organizations like Ocean Conservancy to learn how you can schedule your own beach cleanup event.
Volunteering in this way may feel small in the face of our enormous plastic problem, but it has a real, immediate impact on the health of your local ecosystem. If you can’t make it to a cleanup event, support the conservation groups working to clean up the world by donating financially when you’re able, or by supporting policies that help prevent or clean up plastic waste.
Breathe…
However great (or terrible) you may be at avoiding plastic in your daily life, you are just one in about 7.8 billion people. Individually saving every single sea turtle from plastic will likely prove impossible. It’s completely okay — and still impactful — to focus on reducing your personal plastic footprint or working to keep your local community clean.
…and keep working for systemic change.
Ultimately, the largest impact on our plastic waste problem will come from broad cultural, economic, and policy changes. Here’s a couple of ideas:
- Support policy changes that curb plastic waste. This includes the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, which is currently circulating in Congress, as well as local bans on single-use plastic items.
- Explore concepts like extended producer responsibility (EPR). EPR works to reduce waste by forcing the companies responsible for producing waste to also shoulder the responsibility for cleaning it up. Ideally, the burden this places on a company’s finances and resources will incentivize that company to create products that are less wasteful and more easily recycled, in order to save time and money.
- Focus on creating a circular economy. Instead of prioritizing better recycling, a circular economy would move entirely away from disposables and focus on products that will stand the test of time. Look for companies who take end-of-life responsibility for their products or who purposely design their products for durability. To learn more, check out Heream’s article on the circular economy and Alexa’s article on eco-efficiency.
In the end, you are not singlehandedly responsible for the entire world’s plastic waste. But you can help reduce it—one beach cleanup, reusable straw, or petition at a time.
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