To Solve the Plastics Crisis, We Need to Calm Down About Plastics - Bloomberg
Climate: We Need to Calm Down to Solve the Plastics Crisis - Bloomberg
To Solve the Plastics Crisis, We Need to Calm Down About Plastics
It’s easy to feel that any action is futile. But consumers and producers can make a real difference by recycling more and adopting lighter-weight material.
Our usage just keeps rising.Photographer: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
How to deal with the waste generated by the half-billion metric tons of plastic manufactured each year? One approach is to consume fewer polymers, recycle them more, and stop the rest from getting into the natural environment. Another is to declare the whole process a scam, and hope the problem will somehow go away of its own accord.
Faced with a seemingly intractable dilemma, the latter approach is tempting. Fixing things is hard; assigning blame far easier. Such a strategy is unlikely to change much, however.
Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.