Plastic Waste Plight from Your Body Wash

Do you use body wash? If so, guess how many plastic bottles of your body wash are thrown into the garbage and recycling every year?... The answer is over 1 billion. There’s over 9 billion tons of plastic in the world today and 75% of that waste ends up in landfills, the water we drink, our ocean and streams. And Less than 10% of consumers plastic waste is recycled and a lot of plastics that are used in the bathroom are unrecyclable and if thrown into the garbage where it ends up in a landfill, it can take 450 years for a single plastic bottle to decompose.

Here’s another important statistic on plastic waste, “Half of all plastics ever made have been produced since 2005.” That’s a quote from HBO’s "Last Week Tonight," with John Oliver who devoted the main segment of his show to the plastics industry. You can view HBO’s "Last Week Tonight," with John Oliver full clip below.

I live in Portland, Oregon and shop at the grocery store mentioned during the segment, so I took extra notice as I watched anxiously wanting to learn more than I already knew and understood. And what I learned further encouraged me as a business owner to do more to help curb this trend and take better care of our planet that we share.

And plastic waste is not just causing pollution on the ground; the petroleum-based products are also helping to increase our planet’s climate change. According to a report on on Huffington Post published in May 2019, greenhouse gas emissions from plastics production will equal the pollution output of 200 coal-fired power plants with a 500-megawatt capacity.

You can do something to help solve this massive problem, and it really quite simple, buy bar soap that contains little or no plastic packaging and is fully recyclable.

To learn more about how big of a problem plastic waste is, watch HBO’s "Last Week Tonight," with John Oliver full clip below to learn more.