When you consider how much plastic is in the salty water of San Francisco’s Bay Area, it is not that shocking to be told our globe is producing and dumping far too much plastic into the ocean. This reality was put into the kind of metric Americans can understand today:
An overwhelming 95 percent of plastic packaging worth $80-120 billion a year is lost to the economy after a single use, said a global study by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which promotes recycling in the economy.
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At least eight million tons of plastics find their way into the ocean every year — equal to one garbage truck load every minute, said the report, which included analysis by the McKinsey Center for Business and Environment.
"If no action is taken, this is expected to increase to two per minute by 2030 and four per minute by 2050," it said, with packaging estimated to represent the largest share of the pollution.
This math leads to a terrifying scenario where we have more plastics than fish by 2050. In the ocean. The study was done and presented at the opening of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Sweden.
The study, which you can read here, shows many of the ways that business as usual is not practical or economically viable or, clearly, environmentally sound way to move into our world’s future. What do you do with all of this plastic? There are a lot of people out there trying to come up with meaningful solutions to our plastics problems. There are people trying to recycle old plastics to create affordable housing. The largest plastic toy producer—Lego—has vowed to end using and producing plastics in their rainbow colored toys. Things are being done but more pressure needs to be applied.
Fortune magazine says that a big issue going forward is the financial problems hitting our recycling businesses.
But in contrast to the report’s hopeful plan, the recycling business in the United States is in a period of crisis. With the collapse of global oil prices, the largest recyclers like Waste Management have reported sharp drops in recycling revenue and stagnated recycling rates across the country.
Because working on undoing the never-can-be-understated egregious use and waste of environmentally unsound materials should be a for-profit endeavor. Maybe we can all just wait for the Koch brothers to get their superpowers so they can fly the plastics to the moon for us.