MAINE MONITOR • October 12, 2022
It is incredible that we are making more trash now than we were 20 years ago. Shouldn’t we be making less? The Legislature made an effort to shift some of the costs of recycling from taxpayers to manufacturers. The Extended Producer Responsibility law passed this year. It will spend five years getting implemented before it does anything. Meanwhile, recycling efforts are getting more difficult. Packaging manufacturers are going out of their way to design combinations of materials that cannot be recycled at all. More incredible is that recycling isn’t even the solution to the problem. Practically every plastic cup, lid, jar, bottle, bag ever made (from oil) over the past 80 years or so is still here on Earth in some form. Every cup, lid, bottle, etc., that will be made next year, and the year after, will also remain. The solution is to stop making plastic. Thank God we are not handing out plastic bags at grocery stores any more. But it’s incredible that plastic and oil are still driving us to hell. ~ Dana Wilde