San Francisco has recently introduced regulations that would ban the sale of plastic bottles on city owned property. This is an attempt to break the dependence on single use plastics. Less than a quarter of plastic bottles get recycled. San Francisco is hoping to get people to return to drinking tap water. This goal is attainable in a city like San Francisco where the quality of tap water is very high. A similar change would be harder to enact in places with lower water quality.

Key Takeaways:

• Plastic waste results in a lot of harmful consequences. They destroy the habitats of wildlife and can result in the death of many animals.
• Landfills are usually clogged and this ensures that waste from plastic enters the water system because the plastic takes millions of years to degrade.
• Governments are just recently beginning to realize that the plastic problem is a huge problem and even while recycling facilities exist, few people use them.

“Environmentalists hope measures such as these will expand to other locations to reduce the U.S. addiction to single-use items.”

Read more: https://theecologist.org/2019/apr/03/san-francisco-bans-sale-plastic-bottles