Americans have not slowed their purchase of plastic. On the contrary, disposable plastic consumption continues to grow and is expected to grow for decades to come. Besides the physical largeness of our bodies, there is probably no greater marker of American gluttony than the landfills that we have created to hold all the plastic waste we produce. Great heaps of indestructible trash! Particles that will not degrade for a thousand years!
This is a new problem, less than a century old. Before WWII, tin and glass were the means of transporting things. You had jars and cans and wax paper. Our infrastructure has forsaken these materials in favor of oil-based plastics whose composition is non-standardized and largely unrecyclable.
Yes, unrecyclable. I think a lot of people have this idea in their mind that plastic is some sort of metal that can be melted down and reformed infinitely. No, plastic “recycling” is mostly “downcycling,” shredding and transforming used plastic into a lower quality plastic that will be used maybe once more to make another disposable product. Your water bottle does not get magically reforged into a perfect new water bottle when you toss it into the recycling bin. Hell, it probably isn’t being recycled at all.
There is no mandate on recycling. It is a market business where the transformed plastic product needs to be purchased by a company looking to use it. But in a world where simply making new, high quality plastic is CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP, why would anyone buy crappy recycled plastics? The whole thing is a fantasy maintained to make people feel better about their wasteful lifestyles.
The solution, thankfully, is pretty easy. Close your wallet to plastic products. Stop buying them. Hell, even if your tap water is bad, you can purchase refillable drums of water at Costco. Don’t use the plastic containers of fruits and veggies, grab them from the bin and put them in a paper bag. Stop using the little floss picks. Grab some standard size glass containers instead of getting a whole new set of plastic tupperware when you inevitably lose the lids to them. Just stop buying plastic?
On a legislative level, our congressional leaders could write up regulation to standardize plastic. Standard sizes, standard lids, standard composition. Such rules would make it easier to reuse the plastics that enter our lives. The greatest legislation of all would be to ban plastic outright, declare it an evil material. Glass and metal can be melted down and reformed again and again. We would be better served to return to that way of life.