Single-Use Plastic
Plastic is a major source of pollution and a growing threat to human health. Single-use plastic bags litter our streets and neighborhoods, plastic bottles clog storm drains, and plastic packaging materials fill dumpsters and landfills.
Scientists have now found tiny pieces of plastic pretty much everywhere on earth, from the deep Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean to the top of Mount Everest. And now the list of places they're finding plastic includes you. Your blood, your lungs, your brain…tiny microscopic pieces of plastic find a home anywhere in your body. In fact, they're even finding bits of plastic in human placentas, so babies are now being born with pieces of old plastic bottles and bags inside.
The happy ads for the plastic industry feature a trio of young people, all smiling broadly as they claim, with a straight face, that their plastic bottles are made to be re-made. But the truth is there is no technical, economically feasible way of making a used plastic bottle into another plastic bottle. Suffice it to say that once plastic has been manufactured using a recipe of fossil fuels and toxic chemicals, there is no way to un-make the plastic and tease out its individual components. The chemicals are baked-in and will stay with the plastic forever.
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Listen to a Grassroots podcast "Drinking Plastic" with Mike Belliveau of the non-profit Defend our Health. .