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It's such a pleasant surprise to me how effectively and quickly people have become concerned about this issue. The recent WWF report came out less than 2 years ago [1]. Microplastics were obviously known for a long time, but that's when conversations about microplastics re-ignited. And now we can see an entire country declaring plastics toxic and restricting them. If you'd asked me an hour ago, I'd have predicted it'd take at least another decade before concern about this would spread widely enough to prompt a national policy shift. Great to see that raising public awareness can actually do something!

[1] https://wwf.panda.org/?348371/Could-you-be-eating-a-credit-c...

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Environmental action can be taken relatively quickly when nation-state-level corporate interests aren't funding campaigns to oppose it. The premier example is the banning of CFCs in the 1980s in defense of the ozone layer:

"The discovery of the hole [over Antarctica] was evidence that the magnitude of the problem was far greater than scientists had originally predicted. International alarm at the ozone layer’s thinning led to unprecedented multilateral action to ban the dangerous chemicals that were responsible for its deterioration – chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). By 1987, just two years after the hole was discovered, an international treaty was in place that cut the use of CFCs in half. Three years later in 1990, the Montreal Protocol was strengthened to ban the use of CFCs altogether in industrialised countries by the year 2000 and by the year 2010 in developing countries. Today, the use of CFCs is outlawed by 197 countries around the world and scientists concur that the ozone layer is slowly recovering as a result."

https://www.rapidtransition.org/stories/back-from-the-brink-...

Plastic is a magically useful and durable material with many orders of magnitude more uses than CFC. I hope you’re right but looking around the world, there are very few objects that aren’t at least partially made out of some polymer.

Another question is what to do with all the existing plastic. From what I understand there’s not really anything other than high temperature burning that will safely get rid of it without turning it to micro plastic eventually

We could bury it in a giant pit somewhere without a lot of water running through it (prevent leeching).

The actual amount of waste there is isn’t actually that high if you were to store it in a giant cube somewhere, the problem is the logistics of that, and the fact that right now it’s everywhere.

I can’t find a source right now but I remember something like, if you were to take all the garbage produced by the world and put it in one place it would be a kilometer cubed, or something like that.

That does not sound right. Just based on pictures like these:

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/27/world/asia/indias-plague-...

The US alone produces near 300 million tons per year, and a kilometer cube of water weights 1,000 million tons.

https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-...

It may have been per year, I don’t recall. The waste in that photo does not seem very deep, so it’s possibly taking up a lot more area than needed.

So if we go by that stat (300 million tons per year) we need 0.3km^3 per year for the United States to store all of its waste. So let’s say we have a hundred years worth, that’s 30km^3. Could we dig a hole 30km^3 somewhere? Not really, we can’t dig that deep generally. If we made this hole (or structure, it could have walls and a net over possibly) 100km by 100km it would need to be 2.7km deep/high to store 100 years of garbage.

It would be difficult to do this, and would probably need more area to be feasible, but I would think it would be less of a mess environmentally to try to contain the problem to a few sites like this rather than having smaller poorly contained dumps all over the world.

The NYTimes magazine [1] ran a piece in 1996 says a 35 square mile landfill, 100 yards deep, will store all US trash until the year 3000. To put that in perspective, that's about 1 tenth of 1 percent of the range land currently available for grazing. I'm sure someone could find a corner in a desert somewhere for such a need if required.

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is-gar...

fungal food, perhaps - https://leaps.org/plastic-eating-mushrooms-let-you-have-your...

> how effectively and quickly people have become concerned about this issue.

I don't really know how to take this.

Surely you're joking?

People have been banging on about plastics for at least the past 20 years while I've been paying attention, so probably longer.

So some report came out two years ago, that was long overdue.

A long overdue report came out that prompted a long overdue state level response, in less than 2 years

A perspective.

This is amazing, it literally made my day!

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