PLASTIC AND WHAT TO DO WITH IT?

IN THE MOVIE, THE GRADUATE, the young hero, at this graduation party, is drawn aside and given advice what would be a good future....
"Plastic," he learns, "the future is plastic."
At least for the residents of the oceans, this seems to be the case.
According to EcoWatch, a joint US-Australian study estimates that 8 to 12 million tons of plastic waste enter the oceans each year.  I suppose that, over two decades,  this adds to maybe 240 million tons, forming vast gyres.

Much of this is plastic bags like the ones I see blowing around the supermarket parking area,sometimes retrieve, and put in the rubbish bins.
Here in the US, 13% of the 4.5 pounds of trash we throw away each day consists of plastic. A good deal of this ends up buried in municipal tips.
Most of the stuff in the oceans comes from China and other Asian countries, according to the study.

Although plastic bags and the like could as well be made from plant material, petroleum and natural gas are the basic constituents of the plastics we encounter.  That is a lot of fossil material...according to the US Energy Information Administration, it is about 4.4% of fossil fuel produced.  Wow!!!

The plastic gets thrown away, washes into drains when it rains, enters the rivers and, eventually, the ocean.  There some gets into fish, usually killing them.  As the plastic breaks down into molecular sized bits, it enters plankton and rises through the food chain.  At this point, lots of fish are caught by us and we eat them, thus recycling plastic in ways we never dream of.

One wonders what could be done about this.  One might be tempted to think that, if just this is perhaps the one thing that, if fixed, would make a great difference...well worth attempting.

'Dream on, Robert', do I hear you say?

A Popular Science article (The Garbage Man) tells the amazing story of Mike Biddle who unearthed how recover plastic constituents from waste plastic so that these can be recycled as new plastic material for 10% of the cost of making the stuff from fossil fuel stock. He still has a research plant here in the US but had to give up recycling due to not being able to get enough raw waste materials.  Seems we only recycle 13% of plastic over here.  Now he has operations in China, the UK, and Austria.

What blows my mind is the possibility that plastic material can be recycled at a 90% saving in manufacturing costs while, at the same time, providing a powerful economic incentive to get on with crude recycling operations that would prevent plastic ever getting into the oceans.  AMAZING!!!

Here is George Biddle where he loves to be,