Its been nearly a century since plastic became commonplace in our lives. And over the years it has slowly made its way into every corner of the planet and when I say every corner, I mean it. Studies have found plastic in human placentas as well as in most food we consume. Plastic litter can be found as high as Mount Everest and as deep as the Mariana Trench. Like many revolutionary inventions, plastic reshaped the world in ways we could never have imagined, and not all for the better. But now that the plastic cat is out of the bag it isn’t going back in without a fight! The average single use plastic bag is utilized for 10 to 20 minutes, the time it takes us to get our shopping from the store to our homes and the bag to end up in the bin. From the bin, that bag will go to landfill where it will take over 1000 years to break down. This scenario is based in a country fortunate enough to have waste management systems in place. We toss our plastic bags into the general waste bin. Once a week, we wheel the bin out to the curb, and by morning it’s empty. As if by magic, the rubbish disappears, forgotten about, as the cycle quietly repeats itself. But imagine if that system didn’t exist. How long would it take before our sidewalks, homes, forests, and rivers were overwhelmed by the waste we produce every day? This is the reality for many countries, where the rise of plastic happened so rapidly that no infrastructure was ever built to manage it. Meet the No Trash Triangle Initiative This past week, I had the pleasure of meeting some of the team behind the No Trash Triangle Initiative (NTTI)
Its been nearly a century since plastic became commonplace in our lives. And over the years it has slowly made its way into every corner of the planet and when I say every corner, I mean it. Studies have found plastic in human placentas as well as in most food we consume. Plastic litter can
