War Against Plastic Pollution Is Being Lost

The reliance on plastic - the plastic addiction - is only increasing.... Plastic clothes (polyester, nylon, etc.), plastic packaging, practically everything wrapped in plastic. Plastic has become an inescapable addiction -  easy to use, easy to produce, but virtually impossible to get rid of. The world is full of microscopic plastic fibers that come from synthetic clothing, plastic that has decomposed into micro particles and plastic micro particles from many other sources ( many brands of teabags, for example, contain plastic in the bag, releasing billions of plastic particles from a single use teabag).

Plastic pollution removal requires dramatic change on many fronts. Instead, people placate themselves with feel good interventions, underestimating the seriousness and extent of what needs to be done. The plastic addiction is worldwide, but the means of properly disposing of plastic is nonexistent in much of the world. Plastic enters rivers and oceans daily by millions of kilos because hundreds of millions of people have no means of properly disposing of the plastic on which they depend. Proper waste management and proper disposal of plastic waste is virtually nonexistent in many countries. Most plastic waste already in the environment can only be removed by human labor, but there is no serious effort anywhere to provide consistent and fair wages for people to remove plastic pollution. Virtually no money is allocated to ensure that proper waste management and disposal of plastic becomes a universal goal to prevent the further destruction of the oceans. A comprehensive war against plastic pollution remains nonexistent.