Is recycling plastic really worth it? According to National Geographic, 91% of plastic is not recycled. A lot of that plastic can end up in the ocean: “A total of 1.8 trillion plastic pieces were estimated to be floating in the patch - a plastic count that is equivalent to 250 pieces of debris for every human in the world.”
With those horrifying plastic pollution statistics in mind, you might be questioning why so many people aren’t recycling. This article will show that the lack of people recycling is not the issue at hand, our habits are.
How we can help plastic pollution
A lot of the plastic in the oceans are single use plastic products (plastic water bottles, straws, paper cups lined with polyethylene plastic, etc.). The process of stopping the single use plastics from entering the ocean has to start with the consumers. The companies that produce these single use plastics will only produce the amount of product that is demanded. Therefore, the consumers as a whole have the power.
Is recycling worth it to help the environment?
There are recycling benefits, materials are reused and made into new products because of recycling. This saves environmental costs by cutting down on resources used and the production of materials. So yes, recycling does benefit the environment. However, there’s a much larger problem at hand.
Recycling plastic is to saving the Earth what hammering a nail is to halting a falling skyscraper. You struggle to find a place to do it and feel pleased when you succeed. But your effort is wholly inadequate and distracts from the real problem of why the building is collapsing in the first place.
Matt Wilkins - Scientific American, 2018
To fix plastic pollution, we don’t need to recycle more. The big problem is that people think we need to recycle more to stop polluting the oceans with plastic. Instead, we need to fix our individual habits of consumption. So what’s the solution?
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