The features that have made plastic so important in the global market are the same ones that make it such a pervasive pollutant: durability and resistance to degradation.
Interpretation
Plastic's durability has made it a valuable material but has also led to significant pollution issues.
The quote emphasizes the paradox of plastic as both a highly useful material and a major environmental problem. While its durability and resistance to degradation contribute to its widespread use in countless applications, these same qualities cause substantial harm to ecosystems as plastic waste accumulates over time, leading to serious ecological and health issues.
In practice
This quote can be used in a public speech about environmental sustainability.
As climate change moves from a model of the future to the reality of the present, health care systems across the country are facing a difficult set of questions. What are doctors supposed to do when wildfires, rising floodwater or other natural disasters threaten their ability to provide care for patients?
When policymakers, financiers and scientists describe the world decades from now, in the throes of climatic changes that we now only model, they emphasize what might be lost.
A less icy Arctic is coming, and generally speaking, that's not a good thing. Climate change is warming this region twice as fast as the global average, threatening wildlife and indigenous communities.
Take one round-trip flight between New York and California, and you've generated about 20 percent of the greenhouse gases that your car emits over an entire year.
The fact that communities that are relatively powerless often are exposed to more dangerous pollution and the worst effects of climate change: a society like that is one that is less free and less equal for everybody.
We subsidize the disposal of waste in all its myriad forms β from landfills, to Superfund cleanups, to deep-well injection, to storage of nuclear waste. In the process, we encourage an economy where 80 percent of what we consume gets thrown away after one use.
Meat is a mighty contributor to climate change and other environmental problems. The amount of meat we're eating is one of the leading causes of climate change. It's as important as the kind of car you drive - whether you eat meat a lot or how much meat you eat.
Hydraulic fracturing requires massive amounts of water. Disposing of the toxic wastewater, as well as accidental spills, can contaminate drinking water and harm human health.
The women of the Green Belt Movement have learned about the causes and the symptoms of environmental degradation. They have begun to appreciate that they, rather than their government, ought to be the custodians of the environment.
The only way forward, if we are going to improve the quality of the environment, is to get everybody involved.
I wish America would spend even half as much time complaining about plastics in our oceans as we do about actresses' plastic surgery.
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