{"id":540,"date":"2010-01-22T16:02:32","date_gmt":"2010-01-22T21:02:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/itstheenvironmentstupid.com\/?p=540"},"modified":"2010-01-22T16:24:59","modified_gmt":"2010-01-22T21:24:59","slug":"one-plastic-bottle-at-a-time-30-million-times-a-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/itstheenvironmentstupid.com\/?p=540","title":{"rendered":"One Plastic Bottle at a Time; 30 Million Times a Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

THE ONION, December 19, 2010<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>\"bottle<\/a> Wishing to dispose of the empty plastic container, and failing to spot a recycling bin nearby, an estimated 30 million Americans asked themselves Monday how bad throwing away a single bottle of water could really be.<\/p>\n

"It’s fine, it’s fine," thought Maine native Sheila Hodge, echoing the exact sentiments of Chicago-area resident Phillip Ragowski, recent Florida transplant Margaret Lowery, and Kansas City business owner Brian McMillan, as they tossed the polyethylene terephthalate object into an awaiting trash can. "It’s just one bottle. And I’m usually pretty good about this sort of thing."<\/p>\n

"Not a big deal," continued roughly one-tenth of the nation’s population.<\/p>\n

According to the inner monologue of millions upon millions of citizens, while not necessarily ideal, throwing away one empty bottle probably wouldn’t make that much of a difference, and could even be forgiven, considering how long they had been carrying it around with them, the time that could be saved by just tossing it out right here, and the fact that they had bicycled to work once last July.<\/p>\n

In addition, pretty much the entire states of Missouri and New Mexico calmly reassured themselves Monday that they definitely knew better than to do something like this, but admitted that hey, nobody is perfect, and at least they weren’t still using those horrible aerosol cans, or just throwing garbage directly on the ground.<\/p>\n

All agreed that disposing of what would eventually amount to 50 tons of thermoplastic polymer resin wasn’t the end of the world. [Read rest of article]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This spoof from the satirical newspaper, The Onion, on the process that sends 30 million plastic bottles a day into our landfills is actually a pretty good depiction of our problem. As it points out, it’s one bottle at a time, with 30 million small excuses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/itstheenvironmentstupid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/itstheenvironmentstupid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/itstheenvironmentstupid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itstheenvironmentstupid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itstheenvironmentstupid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=540"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/itstheenvironmentstupid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":549,"href":"https:\/\/itstheenvironmentstupid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540\/revisions\/549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/itstheenvironmentstupid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itstheenvironmentstupid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itstheenvironmentstupid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}