Who Pays the Bill for Plastic Waste?
China’s 2018 National Sword Policy ended the country’s role as the recycling bin for the world’s post-consumer plastic scrap and threw global recycling markets into disarray. Reeling on the other side of the globe, American cities were forced to store, incinerate, or throw collected recyclables into landfills. Faced with a rapidly diminishing landfill capacity, China is consolidating and formalizing its domestic recycling industry, an expensive and daunting task.
Cities around the world are struggling with the costs and logistics of collecting and sorting their plastic waste. Less than 15 percent of plastic produced worldwide is actually recycled, due in part to low oil prices that make virgin plastic much cheaper than recycled pellets. The Pew Charitable TrustsBreaking the Plastic Wave report estimates that without decreases in plastic production and increases in recycling, by 2040 plastic pollution entering the ocean will triple from 11
Closing the Loop on Fashion Waste: Q&A with Evrnu cofounder Stacy Flynn
Stacy Flynn is intimately familiar with the ins and outs of fashion’s supply chain. She knows how clothes travel the world as they move through the stages of design, textile production, and garment formation before landing in your local retail store. For years, she managed these supply chains for Dupont and Target, making regular visits to suppliers in China who showed her pristine manufacturing facilities where she examined textile and clothing samples and discussed prices and delivery. Nothing could have prepared her for when she returned in 2010 with a Seattle-based startup to tour smaller textile and dyeing factories, and saw the staggering pollution these second and third tier suppliers generated. Her guides told her that during periods of increased textile production, wastewater emissions turn the rivers deep unnatural hues and factory exhaust smothered the air outdoors and even indoors for the workers.�
Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images
A series of announcements over the weekend at a United Nations climate summit
has bolstered hope that global emissions may still fall in line with the goals of the Paris agreement, heading off
the more severe effects of climate change. These new pledges
come in a year that was bound to be a significant test for the global agreement, even before the Trump administration s withdrawal from it and the global spread of Covid-19.
First, let’s rewind. Five years ago, 195 countries came together to forge the Paris accord after decades of failed attempts to comprehensively address climate change. The countries