What do Americans think about plastic waste in 2024?

If I put a plastic bag in my waste bin or in my recycling bin, it doesn't end up in a tree or river in either case unless someone has comprehensively fucked up. I literally pay my local council a tax directly intended to collect and handle waste in a sensible manner.

The people that are causing the vast majority of these issues are fly tipping or littering.

I can't remember the last time a plastic item of mine ended up "in the wild".

Now, things like micro bits of plastic going down the drain after washing the dishes or running a load of laundry, that feels like a valid target.

In the large grocery store where I shop, unpackaged deli meats and fresh fruits and vegetables involve much less plastic. Of course, plastic bags to put them in is always available nearby.

But for most of the shelves displaying thousands of different products, in a 150 yard lineup of 50-yard-long shelves, nearly every item is wrapped in plastic. Or is a box of plastic-wrapped servings. Or, in many cases, a big plastic container holding dozens of individually plastic-wrapped items. Hmmm.

Order-of-magnitude guess: that store holds thousands of tons of mostly flat and shiny plastic, all of which will soon be dis-assembled and thrown in the garbage. Except for the accidentally eaten pieces.

But when you get to the checkout, the irony peaks. Here you CAN choose between your re-useable bags or paper bags to put your pounds of plastic in. Why not plastic bags? THEY are bad for the environment.

As an American, plastic waste is the last thing on my mind in 2024

I'm always a bit skeptical of those questions. When asked: "Would you do more if you were not busy doing less?", who would NOT say "hmm hypothetically, I guess"?

Great. What does it mean then? That if people cared, then they would stop not caring?

A bigger issue is education about which plastics to put in recycling (1 and 2 if you're unaware, 5 can be but generally isn't). All of our "recycling" heads to landfill for this reason.

i like how local municipalities, who literally have legal responsibility to clean up public spaces, are viewed as less responsible than every single other party, none of whom have any legal responsibility to clean up public spaces.

Some producers are replacing plastic with PFAS coated paper. It boggles my mind that this is seen as a preferable alternative.

ALL plastic recycling should go straight off the truck and back to china where it came from. anything less is a fraud on the American people to use chinese petrochemicals to pollute the amazing U S and A

Worrying about plastic bags when billionaires fly private jets to get coffe in another country, or has someone fly their favorite sports car to another country for the weekend for them to use or to sail in their super yacht, is such a drop in the bucket, but yeah it helps