To the Editor:

Last year China, the biggest importer of plastic waste, stopped buying most recycled waste, sending the recycling industry in the U.S. into turmoil. Before the ban, China took in 45 percent of the world’s plastic waste imports for recycling.

Most people in Princeton make an effort to put plastic bottles and other items into recycling bins. But in the past three months, much of plastic recyclables have been loaded onto trucks, and taken to landfills. This new reality especially threatens communities who live near dumping sites. The rest is being sent to Southeast Asian countries who do not have the infrastructure to manage the waste, contributing to the vast amount of plastic in our oceans.

In New Jersey, GDB International, a recycling and sustainability company based in New Brunswick, is retooling moving from one that exported to China to one that will making each community responsible for the plastic waste it produces.

Plastic can be recycled only a limited number of times, and is difficult to recycle. Each variety of plastic requires a different recycling process, and plastics are made from thousands of different formulas. Even the seven most common types of plastic used in consumer manufacturing — stamped on the bottom with a number inside a triangle — have a variety of resin composition, color, transparency, weight, shape, and size that complicates and often prevents recycling. Plastic films and bags further complicate recycling centers efforts to separate materials as they wrap around the rotating shafts that help separate paper from cans and bottles.

In my lifetime, single use plastic bags, invented in 1965 and introduced into grocery stores in the 1980s have become ubiquitous. According to the Wall Street Journal, 100 billion plastic bags pass through the hands of U.S. consumers every year with only 1-5 percent being recycled.

I personally spent about eight hours this past January picking up at least eight barrels of garbage along the trails of Mountain Lakes Preserve with approximately a third of the volume being plastic. Part of the solution must be a reduction in use and production of plastic. Several N.J. towns have already taken action including Avalon, Beach Haven, Brigantine, Harvey Cedars, Lambertville, Long Beach Township, Longport, Somers Point, Stafford Township, Stone Harbor, and Ventnor.

New Jersey seems poised on the threshold of implementing policy to move our entire state in the right direction, Senate Bill 2776 and A-4330 introduced in June of 2018 to ban stores from handing out single-use plastic shopping bags, plastic drinking straws, and polystyrene food containers (like foam takeout clamshells). The bill would also create a 10-cent fee on single-use paper bags, which would finance a new “Plastic Pollution Prevention Fund.”

The Princeton Environmental Commission passed a resolution in September of 2018 urging Governor Murphy and the Legislature to ban single use plastic bags and promote reusable bags.

I urge Princetonians to sign the petition of support for this comprehensive bill at http://bit.ly/pvanjec and call your representative to let them know you support this bill.

Heidi Fichtenbaum
Carnahan Place