From tropical beaches to Arctic sea ice to fish-insides (including fish we eat):
Plastic waste of all shapes and sizes permeates the world’s oceans…. And a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine makes clear that the U.S. is a big part of the problem.
As the report shows, the U.S. produces a large share of the global supply of plastic resin – the precursor material to all plastic industrial and consumer products. It also imports and exports billions of dollars’ worth of plastic products every year.
On a per capita basis, the U.S. produces an order of magnitude more plastic waste than China – a nation often vilified over pollution-related issues. These findings build off a study published in 2020 that concluded that the U.S. is the largest global source of plastic waste, including plastics shipped to other countries that later are mismanaged.
And only a small fraction of plastic in U.S. household waste streams is recycled. The study calls current U.S. recycling systems “grossly insufficient...
That’s from an article at TheConversation which is
a network of not-for-profit media outlets publishing news stories and research reports online, with accompanying expert opinion and analysis.[1][2] Articles are written by academics and researchers under a free Creative Commons license, allowing reuse without modification.[3][2] Its model has been described as explanatory journalism.[4][5][6] Except in "exceptional circumstances", it only publishes articles by "academics employed by, or otherwise formally connected to, accredited institutions, including universities and accredited research bodies".[7]: 8
More from Meteor Blades, Friday, Dec 3: Report points out that U.S. is planet’s worst plastic polluter
As the fossil fuel industry prepares to greatly expand its production of plastic, a 211-page report released Wednesday concludes that the United States is the world’s leading contributor to the plague of plastic trash that harms marine life. Titled Reckoning with the U.S. Role in Global Ocean Plastic Waste, the report was congressionally mandated in the Save Our Seas 2.0 act in 2020 and published by the National Academy of Sciences. The authors say that, by the end of next year, the United States should create a national strategy for dealing with the problem.<big>
The success of the 20th century miracle invention of plastics has also produced a global scale deluge of plastic waste seemingly everywhere we look. The visibility of global ocean plastic waste, paired with increasing documentation of its ubiquity, devastating impacts on ocean health and marine wildlife, and transport through the food web, has brought widespread public awareness. Recent global attention has made it clear that the ocean plastic waste problem is linked inextricably to the increasing production of plastics and how we use and treat plastic products and waste from their beginning to well beyond the end of their useful lives.
</big>In the past six decades, plastic waste in the United States has soared to 42 million metric tons a year, a total more than all of the European Union nations combined. This comes out to 287 pounds for each person in the States...
Of all the year round, the holiday season arguably is our heaviest polluting moment. That makes it the time of year we’re most likely to let ourselves off the hook, the time of year when environmental commitment is the hardest.
<big>“We choose to [do necessary] things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”
Kennedy thundered those words …</big>
on Sept. 12. 1962, imploring America to reach higher.
The top blockquote is from an article at TheConversation which is
<small>a network of not-for-profit media outlets publishing news stories and research reports online, with accompanying expert opinion and analysis ... Except in "exceptional circumstances", it only publishes articles by "academics employed by, or otherwise formally connected to, accredited institutions, including universities and accredited research bodies”...</small>
We too are a fact-based community, most of us here are Americans. It may be we’re on the brink of a SCOTUS decision that is going to make us yearn to drown our sorrows in whatever comforts and pleasures we can.
Are we as individuals strong enough and tough enough to choose the harder path upward? Even when we’re surrounded by so many taking the easy road?
Michelle Obama’s convention address, about 8min30seconds in:
...https://youtu.be/Ty3QtuVJwoA
[Full transcript at this diary by dk staff Barbara Morrill https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/8/17/1970193/-Michelle-Obama-delivers-epic-speech-on-the-opening-night-of-the-Democratic-convention]
...what do we do now? What’s our strategy? Over the past four years, a lot of people have asked me, “When others are going so low, does going high still really work?” My answer: going high is the only thing that works, because when we go low … we just become part of the ugly noise that’s drowning out everything else. We degrade ourselves. We degrade the very causes for which we fight.
But let’s be clear: ...Going high means taking the harder path. It means scraping and clawing our way to that mountain top...
The time is now.