Drowning In Plastic

I HAVE ABOUT A TON OF PLASTIC in my house, it seems. Everything seems to be made out of the stuff. In my kitchen alone I have an assortment of plastic containers and lids, all scattered about, scratched, torn, mismatched, bent, stained, utterly disorganized. I have no idea what to do with the heap of plastic, other than to throw it away, to contriubte it to the local land fill, my legacy, forever. It will never break down into carbon, at least, not for thousands of years. It is almost impossible to recycle plastic, economically. Only about five percent of plastic is ever recycled. Millions of tones more are being manufactured every year, due to consumer demand. The world is filling up with plastic. War spurs invention and technology. and technology. Plastic, like so many other inventions, emerged from the desperate efforts to invent weapons during World War Two. An awareness that the substance would eventually inundate the world, including us and our bodies, drowning us in it, poisoning the ecosystem, emerged somewhat later, gradually, belatedly. We are killing ourselves with fossil fuels in more ways than one. Demand fore energy is currently increasing, thanks in large part, evidently, believe it or not, not to any increase in manufacturing production or consumer demand or population growth, but rather, because of Data centers, energy demands for artificial intelligence projects and crypto currency. How ironic, all this high technological advance, exacerbating our greatest problem; how to produce sufficient amounts of clean energy. The high tech crowd operating these data centers assure us they seek energy from sustainable, "green" sources. Nuclear power plants are being refurbished and restarted after having lain inactive for years. Technology got us into this climate change and plastic pollution mess, and it will have to be technology which gets us out. Nuclear energy idneed releases no carbon based heat absorbing gases into the atmosphere, contributes nothing to climate change, but nuclear waste presents its own special problem; namely, whre do you put it? Hiding it from ourselves under some mountain in New Mexico is only a temproary solution. Digging ultra heavy radioactive metals from deep out of the ground, or for that matter out of shallow groudnd - is only a temmporary expedient to solving the problem of power. We have learned over the decades that coal, oil, and natural gas lie undergound, beneath the surface of probably every square inch of land and water on the planet. What we have removed, great though it is, is probably ony a tiny fraction of what remains, and what will have to be left exactly where it is and belongs. Removing billions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere, through the use of technology, will prove to be a simple matter, child's play, compared to cleaning up the plastic pollution with which we now know the Earth and our bodies are inundated, saturated. Large installations are now being built, one such by Exxon in Texas, to capture and remove carbon from the atmosphere. The technology, in primitive, inefficient form, exists. The task is to improve it, make it work on a much larger scale, and get it into operation. Precisely how to remove billions of tons of plastic from the world's oceans, from landfills, from the soil all over the world, and last but not least our own gorgeous sexy bodies is quite another matter. Plastic, it seems, is everywhere. Plastic atoms and molecules break down into their smallest components and lodge themselves in our body's fat and muscle tissue, in our blood stream, and, probably, in our bones and brains. There they can remain forever, never decomposing, never bio degrading, and thus, eternal. We are living in the "Anthropocene", the age of human beings. We are now the architects of this planet, and thus, responsible for its health. It is not impossible to imagine carbon sequestration facilities cleaning enough carbon out of the atmosphere to restore normal climatic conditions. But it is very hard to imagine cleaning all the toxic plastic and heavy metals out of our environment, water, soil, air and bodies. Our bodies contain not only plastic, but radioactive metals, in trace amounts, which can be detected, traced,and measured. Nobody escapes all this. We have waited long to begin doing something about it. Have we waited too long?