Waste Not, Want Not: Putting Recyclables in Their Place

Plastics are embedded in a myriad of modern-day products, from pens, cell phones, and storage containers to car parts, artificial limbs, and medical instruments; unfortunately, there are long-term costs associated with these advances. Plastics do not biodegrade easily. There is a region of the Northern Pacific Ocean, estimated to be roughly the size of Texas, where plastics collect to form an island and cause serious environmental impact. While this is an international problem, in the U.S. we also worry about plastics that end up in landfills and may stay there for hundreds of years. To gain some perspective on the severity of the problem, the first plastic bottle was introduced in 1975 and now, according to some sources, roughly 50 million plastic water bottles end up in U.S. landfills every day.