Plastics - Everywhere

Bill McKibben has noted this week in the New Yorker that we have to stop burning things - and notes that trading wood for oil based material may create as many problems as it was thought to solve. That may be a topic for another time. He goes on to discuss the prevalence of plastics in our lives.

Who knew the extent? He interviews Judith Enck, who tells him:

“Microplastics can be found in everything from drinking water to soil to beer to table salt to a cup of tea. In fact, we’re all ingesting roughly a credit card’s worth of plastic each week. Stunningly, scientists recently found plastics in human placentas.”

Enck, who formerly worked in the Obama administration, is a visiting professor at Bennington College and the president of Beyond Plastics, It starts by framing the plastics trifecta - focusing on the three most prominent single use products that can be replaced - and suggest that citizens in the US approach all levels of government to ask for their banning. Canadians can take note. See if you can guess the three most villainous pollution products. They have even created a sample bill to send to legislators, making the case that single use banning is less effective than looking a bans for one product individually.

This is a really good site. Go to it and take advantage of all the resources it offers. There are a number of concrete actions that citizens can take - from writing tea companies to asking food delivery companies to hold the plastic in their packaging. Individual actions are good - but they have to be supported by going to the source of the polluters and telling them what we think.