You may have heard that in 2018 China began essentially rejecting the huge quantities of recyclable material that the United States used to ship there by enforcing very tight contamination restrictions on recovered material.

With this news, many material recovery enterprises at home and abroad could no longer process the overwhelming volume of material. In fact, I learned as a senior in high school that we didn’t have a recycling system in place, and that UCSC, after years of accepting highly contaminated material, eventually gave up and sent everything to the landfill.

These revelations expose two issues: Why is there so much plastic and other waste being produced? And why aren’t people diligent with their recycling?

The second issue has no easy solution, but the first one we can address with a simple ban on nonessential single-use plastics in California by passing SB 54 and AB 1080 in the Legislature.

Bijan Ashtiani-Eisemann
Santa Cruz

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