An epidemic: Excessively prevalent, affecting or tending to affect a disproportionately large number of individuals within a population, community or region at the same time.
My best friend, Alex Vitulano, has dedicated the majority of her time during her last semester of college to study the air quality around Seneca Meadows, the largest active landfill in New York State. For her indepedent study, she's working with air sampling canisters to find out if the Waterloo community has a direct exposure to gases such as methane and carbon dioxide and to see if these levels are really "safe." It's scary just visiting the Seneca Meadows landfill because there's a constant line of trucks on the main roads since this landfill accepts trash from New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Why does Seneca Meadows Landfill carry the burden of all of the trash from these states? It doesn't seem fair to me. As I watched Alex set up the air sampling canisters, we talked about how the EPA sets regulations for what "healthy" and "safe" air means and how it's supposed to be okay that the air around Waterloo has an influx of methane and various other chemical compounds. She inspired me to look into our reliance on plastics and if that impacts global waste.
As I drove to the landfill, I saw a lot of trucks carrying plastic bags. I started to wonder how many recyclable items end up there. If you're familiar with sustainable consumption, you know that the amount of generated plastic waste throughout the United States is staggering each year. We fool ourselves into thinking that all plastics end up in recycling plants. The lack of recycling plants, the lack of technology to break down these chemical compositions and the influx of plastics overwhelms material management centers, so these plastics end up decomposing in landfills for eternity or worse, in the oceans.
Each year, 100 billion plastic bags are thrown away in the US, and about 8 million tons of plastic are dumped into the ocean each year as well. The real truth is that plastic degrades into tiny pieces that fish can ingest. Do you still want to eat that those fish even though you're not sure how many particles of our plastic they've ingested? The bigger picture is scary.
Globally, less than 1% of plastic bags are recycled. If San Francisco can ban plastic bags from all retail stores, can't we all? Starting a trend to switch to reusable bags would be much easier if stores stopped focusing on convenience by pushing plastics on us.
Plastic is a disastrous mess that requires the extraction of fossil fuels and causes ocean pollution and chemical sludge. I'd be mortified to know how many plastics that I've touched are now sitting in a landfill like Seneca Meadows now. It's going to require public demand from society to eliminate these unnecessary plastics from our daily lives. By reducing the demand, we would reduce the need for production. According to The U.K. Guardian News, it takes up to 500 years for plastic bags to fully break down. Do we really want to leave the Earth with a lining of plastics at the bottom of our oceans for our future generations?
