{"id":101859,"date":"2020-10-31T07:15:40","date_gmt":"2020-10-31T04:15:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/1-to-2-million-tons-of-us-plastic-trash-go-astray-study-finds\/"},"modified":"2020-10-31T07:15:40","modified_gmt":"2020-10-31T04:15:40","slug":"1-to-2-million-tons-of-us-plastic-trash-go-astray-study-finds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/1-to-2-million-tons-of-us-plastic-trash-go-astray-study-finds\/","title":{"rendered":"#1 to 2 million tons of US plastic trash go astray, study finds"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#1 to 2 million tons of US plastic trash go astray, study finds<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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More than a million tons a year of America\u2019s plastic trash isn\u2019t ending up where it should. The equivalent of as many as 1,300 plastic grocery bags per person is landing in places such as oceans and roadways, according to a new study of U.S. plastic trash.<\/p>\n

In 2016 \u2014 the last year enough data was available and before several countries cracked down on imports of American waste \u2014 the United States generated 46.3 million tons of plastic waste, by far the most in the world. Between 2.7% and 5.3% of that was mismanaged \u2014 not burned, placed in landfills or otherwise disposed of properly, according to a study in Friday\u2019s journal\u00a0Science Advances<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Between 1.2 million and 2.5 million tons of plastic generated in the U.S. were dropped on land, rivers, lakes and oceans as litter, were illegally dumped or shipped abroad then not properly disposed of, the study found.<\/p>\n

If you took nearly 2.5 million tons of mismanaged plastic waste \u2014 bottles, wrapp<\/a>ers, grocery bags and the like \u2014 and dumped it on the White House lawn, \u201cit would pile as high as the Empire State Building,\u201d said co-author Jenna Jambeck, an environmental engineering professor at the University of Georgia.<\/p>\n

Previous studies\u00a0hadn\u2019t put the United States among the 10 worst<\/a> offending nations for plastic waste in oceans. That\u2019s because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency only tracks what goes into official parts of the waste stream such as landfills and recycling centers, and its data doesn\u2019t capture the dirtier aspects of plastic trash disposal, study authors said.<\/p>\n

So some researchers from previous studies decided to look deeper into what happens to U.S. trash and found so much is improperly handled that America ranks as high as the third-worst ocean plastic polluter. The study estimated that 560,000 to 1.6 million tons of U.S. plastic waste likely went into oceans.<\/p>\n

\"Plastic
Plastic and other debris sits on the beach on Midway Atoll in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.<\/span>Caleb Jones via AP<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cWe are facing a global crisis of far too much plastic waste,\u201d said study lead author Kara Lavender Law, an oceanography professor at the Sea Education Association in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The new research \u201cwas motivated by the fact that we know the United States was leaking more plastic than estimated,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

The study\u2019s estimates range so widely, Law said, because so much of what the researchers explored were waste disposal activities that don\u2019t get meticulously measured.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis more detailed estimate provides a more realistic view of our mismanaged waste and leakage,\u201d said University of Toronto ecology professor Chelsea Rochman, who wasn\u2019t part of the study. \u201cWe consume a lot of plastic per capita which then becomes plastic waste. We recycle very little of this material.\u201d<\/p>\n

A large but hard to quantify part of the problem involves the 51% of U.S. plastic waste shipped abroad for recycling to countries that routinely mismanage waste, Law said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re putting this in the blue bin and then it\u2019s getting trucked to Boston,\u201d Law said. \u201cAnd then it\u2019s getting put on a ship that\u2019s sailing most of the way around the world for somebody to unpack it and pick through it and cut labels off it in hopes that some portion of that material will be turned into (plastic) pellets and into a children\u2019s toy or whatever.\u201d<\/p>\n

The situation has been changing, she said. China and other countries have become more restrictive about taking U.S. trash imports, and more plastic is ending up in landfills here.<\/p>\n

\u201cU.S. exports of plastic waste have declined dramatically \u2014 nearly 70% \u2014 since their peak in 2016,\u201d Joshua Baca, vice president for plastics at the industry group\u00a0American Chemistry Council<\/a>, said in an email. Beginning next year, many countries won\u2019t accept U.S. waste exports because of a new international agreement, he said.<\/p>\n

Baca said the industry is spending billions of dollars trying to fix the problem, with modernized recycling technology<\/a> and new business models to reduce waste while urging mandatory recycled content standards for new products and packaging.<\/p>\n

The EPA last week launched a\u00a0new strategy<\/a>\u00a0for combatting marine litter and next month will have a\u00a0recycling summit<\/a>, said agency spokesman James Hewitt.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe best thing you can do environmentally is to produce no waste at all,\u201d Jambeck said.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#1 to 2 million tons of US plastic trash go astray, study finds” More than a million tons a year of America\u2019s plastic trash isn\u2019t ending up where it should. The equivalent of as many as 1,300 plastic grocery bags per person is landing in places such as oceans and roadways, according to a new…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":101860,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2020\/10\/04F63A5F-AAAA-4C0C-8200-444615AE5304.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[77885,10595,71388,67907],"class_list":["post-101859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-10-31-20","tag-environment","tag-plastic-bags","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101859"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101859\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}