To the editor:
The recycling industry has gotten a bad rap lately. Headlines like “Is This The End Of Recycling?” don’t help anything. We should all know by now that we cannot continue to pile our waste in landfills. As the recycling industry struggles to figure out ways to process the plastics, the plastics industry produces new, more complicated plastics with no thought as to how we, the public, or the recyclers, will deal with the residue. Our taxes pay for the cost of disposal at our transfer stations and landfills.
The plastics industry is growing and extremely profitable. The industry is directly responsible for the problem yet we let them off the hook and blame the recycling industry. Since the 1950s only about 9 percent of all plastics manufactured has been recycled. The rest is in our landfills or floating around somewhere it shouldn’t.
More than 40 percent of plastics produced are packaging, a single use product. They’re designed to be thrown away immediately after use. Even the “biodegradable” plastics will only degrade under optimum conditions. Our system here in the US has 7 different categories of “recyclable” plastics but our municipal facilities can only handle two or three of these categories. Good luck trying to recycle the other 5 categories. Even if they are recycled, plastics can only be recycled once or twice before they need to be discarded.
We need to change all this. I would like to see the plastics manufacturing industry be more responsible for the waste they create. We can start with the most insidious plastics: the single use types. We should not allow plastics manufacturers to create these products unless they can show a clear, simple way to keep them out of the waste stream.
The single use plastics bill recently introduced to NH Congress failed to pass. We need to bring it back and pass it.
Carl Querfurth
Jaffrey