Fair Wage Employment And Plastic Pollution

There are three possible ways in which the serious issue of plastic pollution contaminating coastlines and other areas can be addressed - technology, relying upon volunteers, or by employed labor. Technology cannot remove plastic from mangroves, rocky shores, coastal forests, and many other areas. Volunteerism is extremely limited in many developing countries where few people can afford to be volunteers. If technology or volunteerism worked in the many developing nations that are being environmentally destroyed by plastic pollution, it would have happened already. 

And so the plastic sits, growing larger every day by the addition of more plastic trash,  with much of it breaking down into smaller pieces that can never be recovered. 

There is a critical need to set in motion the large scale employment of disadvantaged people to remove plastic pollution.

In developing countries, the source of a great deal of plastic pollution, there are high levels of poverty and unemployment. People need work, and the environment needs to be cleaned.

Providing impoverished people with work to remove plastic pollution is a straightforward anti poverty, environmental project. 

The employment must pay a fair wage. It cannot be the piecemeal employment practiced in some places in which people are only paid for the recyclable materials they collect. Almost all plastic waste is not recyclable. All plastic trash must be removed from the environment, which requires a great deal of work and effort. Paying people a fair wage helps not only the people employed, but also the environment.

Right now huge amounts of plastic trash litters coastlines and other areas throughout the developing world, with more added every day. The goal, to start a widespread movement employing disadvantaged people to remove plastic waste is as out of reach as ever. 

Plastic waste gets worse every single day, killing seabirds, sea turtles, dolphins, whales, fish and other wildlife. It harms people also, and still nothing gets done. 

One day, perhaps when it is already too late, employing people and paying them a fair wage to remove plastic pollution from coastlines and other areas will finally happen on the massive scale needed. Every day when people that can be working sit idle is another day in which wildlife, people and the oceans are needlessly harmed.