The implications of the rise of plastic waste due to carelessness and littering

A recent article in the Huffington Post brings to our attention the fact that an enormous amount of plastic waste is finding its way into the ocean.

Most of us know that in many ways the ocean is the starting point of the food chain.  (You could trace the chain of food to the energy from the Sun, but fish is an important source of food, and endangering the source of fish is a terrible thing for many countries.)  You could read the article for yourself, and gross yourself out with the disgusting visuals presented there.

Any visitor to a Third Word country in the past twenty years or so would have certainly seen multi-colored plastic bags flying in the breeze.  Even in the US, young people (and probably mature adults as well) sometimes just toss used plastic bags on the street.  Littering is a consequence of lack of education.  Unfortunately, I suspect that college kids are a major contributor to littering, but we know very well that being enrolled in college is no guarantee that someone is educated.  (It would be interesting to see whether littering on campuses is correlated with the perceived quality of the education in that campus.  I have no idea.)

People on the Alt Right, I suspect, would be quick to point out that foreigners and minorities are probably the biggest sources of plastic pollution in the world, extrapolating from the fact that China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand (in no particular order) are the biggest contributors to ocean pollution via mismanaged landfills (or mismanaged waste).

Part of the problem is that these are poor countries, and they have other priorities than careful waste management; because of the limited resources of each poverty-stricken family, an immediate goal for every person is probably that of getting rid of any piece of useless plastic onto the street.  Of course we know that these very people are going to have this same plastic impacting their food supply, but we can easily see that this information is not going to make a difference in their waste-disposal habits.

As I see it, people and organizations in the First World, that is we, will have to take action to mitigate this problem.  In other words, we will have to actually organize to take garbage out of the oceans, especially plastic garbage.  Many of our compatriots will be indignant, because we are not causing the problem, or at least, not the major contributors to it.  We recycle our grocery bags, with which various manufacturers make outdoor furniture, and, I suspect, things like composite patio floors, etc.  But we will soon have to make heroic efforts to ensure that we keep the lungs of whales and other marine mammals, and the gills of all sorts of fish, whether we eat them or not, clear of plastic, because everybody eats somebody, and everybody is eaten by somebody else, sooner or later, and we have to keep sidelining waste plastic until such time as the casual use of plastics for all sorts of inessential purposes declines substantially, or, ideally, entirely.

The answer to "Paper or plastic?" must be "Paper, please," without exception.  I wish our grocer, Wegman's, offers us a choice.  (Maybe they do, and we just never realized it.)  We must organize our friends and acquaintances to reduce plastic use.  We must avoid selecting synthetic-fiber clothes, and pay a little more for cotton and silk and linen.  We must keep our eyes and ears open for any news that the natural fiber industries are using polluting chemicals, and jump all over them if we hear that they do.

The planet we received from our parents was a far healthier place than the one we're leaving for our grandchildren.  Some of us have gotten into the habit of ignoring this sort of bad news; we think of ourselves as fragile, and unable to tolerate too much bad news on any given day.  Ignoring these warning signs is no longer an option.  If we have influence among our friends and acquaintances, we must begin to wield that influence now.  Political action is good, but direct action, and support of green initiatives is beginning to look like a no-brainer.

Perhaps we should take the Green Party more seriously, and address head-on any weaknesses in its leadership.  There wasn't anything very green in their party platform in the last election; perhaps it is time to take it over, and make it have a more explicitly environment-friendly set of policies and objectives than it has had in the past.

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