By John Douglas Moore, Co-Chair, NCRA Zero Waste Advocacy Committee
Please watch the 15 minute segment of Sunday, January 3’s edition of “60 Minutes” which first focused on Boyan Slat’s enterprise to clean-up large ocean plastic gyres by using a large net to collect it, and then segued to the global problem of plastic pollution, painting a pretty grim picture.
The show did not question Slat about what he intended to do with the collected plastic and gave a light brush to any current performance flaws in the technology. China’s National Sword was highlighted as impacting plastics recycling but did not address impacts on collected contaminated paper, cans, and bottles, and did not confront the big lie of single stream collection long advocated by monopolistic trash haulers.
An intelligent adult watching the show asked me “does this mean my plastic Starbucks cup does not get recycled when I put it in the store’s recycling bin?”
Lest you have any doubt that we cannot recycle our way out of plastic pollution and need to up our efforts to reduce plastic use and pollution, please watch this show segment. […]