A Rant on the Single-use Plastic Boom

—By Angela Pan

Single-use plastics present a growing global environmental crisis. They are made to be thrown away in just minutes, but impose high, often long-term, economic, environmental and health costs. Encouragingly, the United States and China--the world’s plastic waste superpowers--both supported the creation of a Global Plastic Treaty to stem the flood of plastic waste that threatens marine ecosystems.

Municipal waste systems in both the United States and China are struggling to manage the boom in single-use plastics. Many single-use plastics are very low-quality and thus hard or economically impractical to recycle. Weak markets for plastic recycling also means mountains of singleuse plastic ends up in landfills or incinerators, which can pollute the surrounding environment. Some of the 9-10 percent of plastic waste the United States ships overseas for recycling, ends up leaked into the ocean. As discussed in this issue’s intro duction, the growth in single-use plastics is accelerating greenhouse gas emissions. It is encouraging that plastic as a climate threat is starting to get more attention from researchers and activists in the United States and China.

As both the United States and China are starting to prioritize the single-use plastic waste problem, these statistics were easier to find! The data reveals while China generates overall more single-use plastic waste than the United States, per capita the U.S. uses almost three times more single-use plastics than China.

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has led to a new wave of single-use plastic. A new study by Chinese and U.S. researchers calculated that 8+ million tons of pandemic-associated plastic waste, mostly medical waste generated by hospitals, led to a sharp rise in ocean plastic pollution.1