Across the Bag It documentary, Vice video and National Geographic article, two predominant feelings stuck with me: fear and guilt. Fear, because of the amount of waste we have already and are continuing to generate on this planet, and guilt because of my personal contribution to it.
Bag It raised the point that we really do not know what happens to our waste once we recycle it. I myself am guilty of tossing an empty single-use water bottle into the recycling bin, feeling relieved of any responsibility after naively believing that the plastic I just tossed out will somehow find its way into a place where it can be effectively reused. However, both the National Geographic article and Vice video totally disproved this naive thought.
A point that really stuck out to me in the National Geographic article was that “only nine percent of the plastic produced globally is recycled.” Where does the rest of the plastic go? As was mentioned in Bag It, we are constantly using plastic, a material that lasts forever, to hold products that last less than a day.
The lack of proper government regulation is possibly the most concerning issue that arose from the reading, video and documentary. In Bag It, it was mentioned there was no regulation on using the recycling symbol. In the National Geographic article and Vice video, it seems that countries that were previously exporting their waste to China have no solid internal system for processing waste. Seeing the piles of stagnant recycled material blocks in the Vice video along with the discussion over companies receiving waivers to throw recyclables away make it so evident that countries like the United States have a waste management system that simply does not work. However, the root of that problem is that we are simply generating way too much waste in the first place, and for seemingly no reason at all other than favoring convenience and capitalism over the environment.
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