Continued Failure To Be Serious About Plastic Pollution

Every single day millions of kilos of new plastic trash enters into rivers and oceans.

Thousands, if not millions of people, need to be gainfully employed and paid a fair wage to remove plastic trash already in the environment before there is a positive impact.

Most plastic trash can only be removed from the environment by manual labor, not technology. In developing countries, few can afford to be volunteers. Relying on volunteers or technology and not on employed workers ensures the plastic pollution catastrophe continues.

Billions of people in developing countries are as dependent on plastic as people in developed countries. Proper waste management is not available for most of these people. The plastic waste of hundreds of millions of people living along rivers and coasts goes into rivers and oceans. The plastic waste of hundreds of millions of people living elsewhere goes into land areas and waters not designed for this waste.

There is no movement to ensure proper waste management is available to all.

There is no movement to ensure the proper disposal of plastic waste.

Plastic waste gets openly burned in many places, poisoning people and the environment.

Plastic waste gets openly dumped in many places, ensuring it enters into rivers and oceans.

The high technology employed by certain developed countries to properly dispose of plastic waste and use the plastic waste for energy is absent in virtually all of the developing world and in much of the developed world.

1. Unless proper waste management is worldwide, plastic waste will continue contaminating lands, rivers and oceans. No matter how much plastic volunteers or technology removes from the environment in developing countries, it will all return in the absence of proper waste management.

Ocean devices, river devices, other forms of technology, and volunteer efforts, must not obscure the enormous failure to provide billions of people made plastic dependent with proper waste management.

River devices collecting plastic would not have to exist in the first place if people up river had a way to properly dispose of their plastic.

Some people lobby against plastic straws (which should be banned but is only a tiny fraction of the plastic pollution entering the environment daily and that is already in the environment), but sit idly by unconcerned that literally billions of people relying upon plastic will continue dumping their plastic waste into the environment because no other options exists.

The recycling myth, which includes developed countries shipping plastic waste to developing countries already drowning in plastic, must end. Proper disposal of plastic and keeping it out of the environment must become the priority.

The only way to stop the plastic pollution disaster is to employ people to remove plastic waste from the environment and ensure that proper waste management is available to the billions of people in developing countries that are plastic dependent.