>>21030721>cause NOBODY has figured out how to actually deal with plastic waste.It's simple, you don't. It's gonna be there forever basically. If there are geologists 1,000,000 years from now they'll be able to see the layer in earth's rock where plastics enter the sediment. There's plastic at the bottom of the marianas trench. Not just microplastics, but whole fucking plastic bags. Antarctic snow contains plastic. Even earth's orbit has plastic trash floating around.
It's never going away unless we first stop producing it, which isn't going to happen. "cleanup" efforts are pitiful, they clean up thousands of tons over the course of years, while MILLIONS of tons are dumped EACH year. In 2015, there was about 9 million tons of plastic in the ocean; in 2023 the minimum estimate was 75 million tons, could be as high as 200 million tons. It's not slowing down, it's speeding up.
