Taking Big Plastic to Court

KPFA - Terra Verde

Plastics are pretty much inescapable these days, and that’s no mistake. The plastics industry has flooded our lives with countless single-use product, from bags, to food packaging, to drink bottles. This plastic now fills our landfills, litters our coastlines, and permeates our bodies. And still, the plastics industry creates more, pointing to plastics recyclability as the solution to our mounting plastic pollution crisis.

Of course, recycling isn’t the solution they claim it is. Only 9 percent of the plastic that has been pumped into the world since 1950 has been recycled. And here in the US, only about 5 percent of the single-use plastic products we use today are recycled.

As the scale of the crisis grows, environmental advocates have started taking plastic producers and distributors to court for their role in deceiving the the public and driving the crisis we now find ourselves in. Sumona Majumdar, Chief Executive Officer of Earth Island Institute, and Dianna Cohen, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Plastic Pollution Coalition, join Terra Verde Host and Earth Island Journal Managing Editor Zoe Loftus-Farren to talk about these efforts

The post Taking Big Plastic to Court appeared first on KPFA.