Guest Blog:The Institution of Plastic: We need a cultural reformation, not just clean-up
This Blog is from the Plastic Pollution Coalition to coincide with the UN Oceans Conference Ocean, Culture, Environment We were heartened to see Margaret Atwood’s column in The Guardian , detailing the ever-increasing perils we are facing from our worldwide dependence on single-use plastic. We are polluting our own food supply by dumping plastics into the environment at an alarming rate. We are damaging our own health and our children’s development by taking into our bodies the chemicals leaching from single-use plastic packaging of our food and drinks. Ms. Atwood advocates for reformation of the somewhat nebulous “institution” of plastics, with which we consummately agree: the reverence we’ve built toward this expensive, destructive material might very well be our undoing as a global society. We undoubtedly must find a way to collect, clean, and recycle the plastics we’ve already made and dumped worldwide. But plastics are only one cog in a larger system, a single-use cu...