Quotes & Sayings About Plastic Waste

My obsession is plastic packaging. It makes me sick, all the waste. Everything about it disappoints me. — Theo James

Of all the waste we generate, plastic bags are perhaps the greatest symbol of our throwaway society. They are used, then forgotten, and they leave a terrible legacy. — Zac Goldsmith

He grabbed the legs and addressed their owner ... current owner anyway. "Hold still. I'll get you out in a second." Then he hissed at me "Trash goes in the garbage can, Zeke, not people."
It was clear to me this guy was trash, but Griffin probably wanted to sort him into paper, plastic, glass, and human waste of space. See? Psychotic. — Rob Thurman

There are five known gyres spinning around in our world's oceans. A gyre is a slowly moving spiral of currents created by a high pressure system of air currents. A spinning soup, so to speak, is made of what exists in the water. And in this case, the gyres are spinning with millions of tons of our discarded and forgotten about plastic waste! — Brandon Boyd

Energy literacy means you can see the waste in disposing of a plastic bottle after you've drunk water from some place on the other side of the world. — Saul Griffith

Rich people's garbage was every year more complex, rife with hybrid materials, impurities, impostors. Planks that looked like wood were shot through with plastic. How was he to classify a loofah? The owners of the recycling plants demanded waste that was all one thing, pure. — Katherine Boo

Do not waste ... Don't waste the vegetable-washing water, splash it on the grapefruit tree instead ... Don't waste anything made of glass or plastic because glass and plastic can be reused ad nauseam ... Don't waste ... a string for retying, a rubber band for conquering dry noodles or hair, rice bags for dishcloths, fish bones for fertilizer ... Anything that comes out of the earth must be returned to the earth ... "If everyone uses more than their share, how can the earth support us?" — Thanhha Lai

That telephones can connect us in seconds to any creature on earth foolhardy enough to lift its own chunk of plastic is wonderful. But it's also terrible, given what a lot of people think and feel about each other. That's why, until they're equipped with some sort of flush or filter or waste-disposal system for the billions of words that ought not to be spoken, I'll not trust the things. — David James Duncan

I'm mad keen on recycling because I'm worried about the next generation and where all this waste we're producing is going. It has to stop. I wash out my plastic containers and recycle envelopes, everything I possibly can. — Cherie Lunghi

Tragedy seems to bring out all varieties of unexpected qualities in people. It was as if some folks got dunked in plastic, vacuum-sealed like backpacking dinners, and could do nothing but sweat in their private hell. And others seemed to have just the opposite problem, as if disaster had dipped them in acid instead, stripping off the outside layer of skin that once protected them from the slings and arrows of other people's outrageous fortunes. For these sorts, just walking down the street in the wake of every stranger's ill wind became an agony, an aching slog through this man's fresh divorce and this woman's throat cancer. They were in hell, too, but it was everybody's hell, this big, shoreless, sloshing sea of toxic waste. — Lionel Shriver

On clear days we trudged through White Forest, a man-made woods of metal trees and plastic leaves constructed in the boon years of Brezhnev when the party boss's wife had grown nostalgic for the birches of her youth. By the time we trudged beneath them, however, the years had ravaged both the forest and the party boss's wife, and the plastic leaves above were as sagging and liver-spotted as her face. We went on. The mud was a mustard we plodded through. On the forest's far side we looked across the expanse of sulfurous waste stretching to the horizon. We shouted. We proclaimed. We didn't need to whisper out here. For a few short weeks in July, red wildflowers pushed through the oxidized waste and the whole earth simmered with apocalyptic beauty. — Anthony Marra