Anjali Yadav | THE DEN
The United States is the world's biggest culprit in the production of plastic waste, and the country urgently needs a new strategy to limit the vast amount of plastic that ends up in the ocean, according to a new report filed with the federal government.
The advent of cheap, all-purpose plastics has created "a global cataclysm of plastic waste that seems everywhere we look", the report said, of which the United States is one of the main contributors to single-use plastic, which ultimately tangles and suffocates marine life, damages ecosystems and brings harmful pollution along the food chain.
Plastic waste has increased dramatically in the United States since 1960, with the country now generating about 2 million tons of plastic waste each year, or about 130 kilograms of waste per person in the US. This total is higher than that of all the member states of the European Union combined. According to the report, the total amount of municipal waste generated in the United States is also two to eight times that of comparable countries in the world.
The recycling infrastructure has not kept pace with the massive growth in US plastic production. Inefficient dumping, dumping, and waste disposal in landfills has caused up to 2.2 million tons of plastic - including everything from plastic bottles to straws to packaging - to "leak". environment each year. The total waste can be even larger than that due to the data gap to track it. Much of this plastic ends up, through rivers and streams, in the world's oceans