Most recycling programs are pretty limited and lame; with a little community pressure, you can make big differences in something that affects thousands to millions of neighbors.

There’s never enough time to finish these comics, so I hope this one was worth the wait. Obviously, you can come up with your own creative solutions to reusing what you already have lying around. The point being, there’s PLENTY of stuff lying around that deserves to be used instead of thrown out. It makes NO SENSE to purchase and manufacture even MORE of it!

Arguments are only as good as their assumptions. When people defend plastic and technology, the argument is usually the same; the assumption is that no one in their right mind would ever want a lifestyle that doesn’t include all of modernity’s conveniences, like this poorly-argued Boston Globe article which completely ignores various alternatives to what the author describes. If you’ve been reading this comic, you can spot his ignorance easily, which paints poor recycling habits as the only real problem we’re facing, forgetting that most plastic isn’t really recyclable and that reusing things is a much better solution than maintaining our consumer lifestyle.

The debate between plastic and glass rages on, with both sides providing their arguments fervently. Here’s a couple of arguments on the side of plastic (though the fact that the wording is incredibly similar between them makes me think there’s some kind of a pre-fab argument you can purchase from a plastic manufacturer if you want your company to seem more “green”.) Case Study #1 vs glass and Case Study #2 vs glass

Plastic technology is changing all the time, with new claims to miracle plastics popping up often, so who knows- someone might have found a workable solution yesterday. Unfortunately, that’s usually not the case, and I’ve gotten excited many a time about this stuff without really understanding what was going on. Here’s a good article on corn plastic; here’s one on bio-degradable plastic. Learn more about the Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone with this fun little site and realize just how connected everything is- that Mississippi River is a major waterway!

Here’s a good article about plastic in general, mentioning the issues with recycling plastic used in food, and how different plastic melting points make everything more complicated. For New Yorkers, here’s the scoop on our city’s recycling program. Not very encouraging news! If you don’t know who Max Headroom is, I am officially an old man.

More explanations about recycling specifics and blow-molding … and here’s a little more on how plastic is made… and some common misconceptions about recycling.

You can read about New York City’s outdated sewage system or about plankton and the ocean’s bio-diversity, if you’re interested. Without plankton, we can’t breathe and we can’t eat. I’m not sure how that isn’t enough of a reason for most people to quit their plastic habits.

You can learn a lot more about nurdles here. This comic (and many others in the series) inspired by Alan Weisman’s superbly-realized The World Without Us.