The US is One of the World's Biggest Sources of Plastic Pollution
MrPlow writes in with a submission, via IRC, for Runaway1956.
The US is one of the world's biggest sources of plastic pollution:
The US is responsible for way more of the plastic polluting the world's oceans than previously thought, a new study reveals. When it comes to the countries that contributed the most to coastal plastic pollution, the US could rank as high as third in the world, it estimates.
"Plastic pollution globally is at crisis level," says Nick Mallos, senior director of the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy's Trash Free Seas program and co-author of the paper published today in the journal Science Advances. "Most problematic is that rather than looking the problem in the eye, for more than 30 years, [the US] outsourced our waste problem to developing countries," Mallos says.
[...] Plastics remain a huge environmental problem, and recycling isn't powerful enough to solve it. Just 9 percent of the world's plastic waste has ever been recycled, according to a 2017 study. The vast majority of it will languish for hundreds of years to come in landfills or in the environment - unless the countries at the heart of the problem start to clean up their act.
Journal Reference:
Kara Lavender Law, Natalie Starr, Theodore R. Siegler, et al. The United States' contribution of plastic waste to land and ocean [open], Science Advances (DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abd0288)
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