Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I want to talk a moment about my REDUCE Act, which is the act to reduce plastic pollution, of which we have a lot. Humans have created 8 billion tons of plastic, and it is all over the place. It is in our water. It is in our rivers. It is in our food. The Presiding Officer is from Colorado. As he knows, there was a study done that tested the rain falling in Colorado that showed that there were microplastics in the raindrops in Colorado. So we have a plastics problem, and this is a bill whose intention is to solve that plastics problem. I want to have you think about three numbers while I am making this speech: 2 percent, 10 percent, and 2050; 2 percent, 10 percent, and 2050. What is 2 percent? Two percent is how much recycled plastic the plastics industry uses in single-use, disposable, throwaway plastic. We had a hearing in the Environment and Public Works Committee, led by Chairman Carper. We had witnesses in who were experts. They said it is actually less than 2 percent. So the plastics industry is comfortable with a business model in which they are only using recycled plastic for less than 2 percent of their production of single-use, disposable stuff. They will then say: Well, yeah, but we don't need to worry about that because then it goes into the recycling bin. Well, first of all, that is not much help if you are only going to use 2 percent recycled plastic in your plastic manufacturing and then 98 percent is all new fossil fuel-based plastic.…”