“Plastic” was the word whispered in the ear of Benjamin Braddock in the 1967 film The Graduate. Back then it was something to invest your career in.  Today we are all drowning in it. 

Going on right now in Paris: UNESCO is conducting negotiations on a binding treaty to do something about plastic everywhere in the world. I hope UNESCO can accomplish something.

Just the other day I was watching a YouTube video by the German Media Studio DW on the problem with plastic.  It said that every human being today eats the equivalent of one credit card of plastic every week.  I was astonished and unnerved.  But my friend nonchalantly remarked, “Didn’t you know that? I knew that.” 
[I decided to skip lunch that day.]

I have a good friend who worked for many years at the DOJ suing polluters on behalf of the EPA.  Several years ago he lamented to me that most of the plastic that goes into the recycle bin never actually gets recycled. He was right (he often is).  Only about nine percent of plastic gets recycled.  The world continues to produce 380 million tons of plastic every year.  If you do the math, a ton is equal to 2,000 pounds, that works out to 760,000,000,000 pounds per year.  If you divide that by 365 and then again by 7,000,000,000 (all the humans alive today), it works out to about 0.3 pounds per day per human.  

[I can see that we need to eat more credit cards.]

But it turns out that even recycling plastic is not such a great idea as there is evidence that the process of recycling multiplies the amount of poisonous chemicals getting mixed into, well, just about everything.

[Every day I am grateful for the things I don’t know.]

Below I have added a link to an article in Salon by Matthew Rozsa about some of the problems with plastic.  Problems like making humans infertile.  Of course, that could be considered a sort of solution I suppose.

If you didn’t know about it, The Flat Earth Chronicle won’t promise not to tell you.