Chartr recently posted this great chart view of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) data on plastics disposal globally. It’s pretty clear that overall use of plastics continues to grow globally and the major way that plastics is getting disposed of is through landfills.
Additionally, as we have heard, some recycling efforts are nothing more than collecting separate trash that ends up being in a landfill anyway because there’s no market for it.
Also as the article points out so much is being dumped into the ocean that there will be more plastic than fish by approximately 2050. One political party here in the United States seems to want to do nothing about plastics while the other is not doing much it seems. We need to continue to put pressure on our elected officials to actually reuse our waste.
We are lucky here in the Pacific Northwest that we definitely recycle cardboard and have a paper processing plant that can deal with it. But as we saw recently, the market has been softening for corrugated paper and the Port Angeles paper mill just closed throwing over 400 jobs out in a rural area that cannot afford to lose that many at one time. The ripple effects from the closure of that mill are going to be substantial for the Olympic Peninsula, Port Angeles, and Clallam county tax revenue streams.
Check out Chartr and their sister publication called Sherwood.
Filed under: Olympic Peninsula | Tagged: Clallam County, Olympic Peninsula, Pollution, Port Angeles |
