How the Plastics Industry is Fighting to Keep Polluting the World
A Bag’s Life (where a school was rewarded $100 to recycled some bags) is just one small part of a massive, industry-led effort now underway to suppress meaningful efforts to reduce plastic waste while keeping the idea of recycling alive. The reality of plastics recycling? It’s pretty much already dead. In 2015, the U.S. recycled about 9 percent of its plastic waste, and since then the number has dropped even lower. The vast majority of the 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic ever produced — 79 percent — has ended up in landfills or scattered all around the world. And as for those plastic shopping bags the kids were hoping to contain: Less than 1 percent of the tens of billions of plastic bags used in the U.S. each year are recycled.
The only way to stop this huge plastic waste problem we have is to stop using frivolous plastic items. The plastics industry is going to fight this hard and they are well funded. Hence an interim solution is to at least make it all biodegradable in a landfill so that it does not accumulate decade after decade. This is what Biogone does. Biogone technology can make its plastic able to be biodegraded away in a matter of years, not decades or centuries. This is going to be essential in the interim until the plastics production is brought under control.
