We've spent our lifetimes filling our lives, shelves, and even our bodies with plastic due to the price and nature of how we are allowed to manipulate this material. This haphazard choice and reliance have fundamentally altered our future and the course of the planet.
Recycling doesn't work. It's just a waste tossed somewhere else so we don't see the trash that we make. And even when it's being used to make new products it's rarely energy efficient and is just a way to make consumers less guilty of the choices they make. Plastic waste just accumulates as none of it is banned or controlled by an ever-ineffectual government while we are sold an assortment of colorful and useless packaging that will be the death of us.
But we can't just stop using plastic. It's too ingrained in our lives for us to turn the other way. We need to ban single-use plastics. We need to kick start and accelerate the development of organic plastics that will stop us from killing ourselves under the growing plastic that we spew out as a society. We need to push for our governments to ban it so we can take a step out of the plastic ocean in which we are drowning in.