Word Association

In The Graduate, Mr. McGuire famously gives Dustin Hoffman’s character Benjamin Braddock one word of advice about his future: Plastics. He wasn’t wrong. There was a big future in plastics. But, sadly, the future of plastic-related waste and pollution could be even bigger. “It’s enough pollution each year — about 52 million metric tons — to fill New York City’s Central Park with plastic waste as high as the Empire State Building.”

+ In many parts of the world, people avoid all that plastic pollution by turning it into air pollution. WaPo (Gift Article): The world is burning an alarming amount of plastic.

+ “The Berkeley research team’s method … breaks the plastics down much further to the level of essentially molecular puzzle pieces, which can be reconstructed into new plastics. That means a sandwich bag could be recycled into a new sandwich bag, a soiled milk jug into a fresh milk jug.” UC Berkeley Chemists Can Now Vaporize Plastic Waste Into Molecular Building Blocks. (Go Bears.)