I know Cori just gave us a lovely presentation on the perils of plastics, but I just came across another statistic that is simply shocking.
Pop quiz: Americans dispose of 60 MILLION plastic bottles:
a) per year
b) per month
c) per day
If you suspected “c”, but were too reluctant to check it and admit that could possibly be right, I have bad news for you. According to the the Container Recycling Institute, Americans use about 70 million plastic bottles a day, but only one in seven actually makes it into a recycling bin. The rest go to landfill, rivers, oceans, fish bellies, etc.
I recommend checking out CRI’s website. One of the more chilling features is the ticker at the top of the page, counting the number of beverage containers landfilled in the US so far this year. The first four digits scroll too fast to count; the ten thousands place ticks by at about one per second. At the time of this post, it’s approaching 60 billion. It’s April. Oh crap.
