08/28/2026
Phelps County Focus published CCL's article on the Opinions page in the August 13, 2026 edition. Read it here!
"Help stop plastic from taking over our environment forever"
Late afternoon July 4th, as I was driving home from west of Rolla on the Interstate, the dark clouds were looking ominous. Fierce winds, from what I later learned produced an EF0 tornado, were blowing crossways over the highway at ground level and buffeted the car. Then I noticed something else. There was trash––plastic trash––blowing steadily by in front of me. I couldn’t make out individual items, but a lot of it looked like bags. The air was filled with it. I imagined it lifting from the branches of trees, off the ground, and out of gullies; blown by winds strong enough that the light weight of all that plastic was floating, going somewhere else. Into a stream, perhaps, and from there to a river, along the watershed of the Mighty Mississippi, into the gulf and maybe even one of those huge ocean gyres, if not caught up by a sea turtle or a dolphin, or some other ocean-going creature.
Plastic is forever. It is made by “cracking” the molecular bonds of petroleum or natural gas into monomers and polymers, mixing them with petrochemicals, thousands of them, only a few of which we know by name––BPA, Phthalates, plasticizers, stabilizers, lubricants, coloring like carbon black. Many are known toxins and endocrine disruptors. These chemicals are the hidden culprits in plastic that leach out into living things, including us.
The plastics themselves don’t go away––they just get smaller and smaller. They become microplastics. They float in the water inside plastic bottles and out of your tap. They float in the air, on the wind like the bags I saw, but higher and higher where they interfere with the heat energy escaping to space, trapping it like a greenhouse gas. They also float in the ocean, eaten by tiny creatures that form the bottom of the marine food chain, and interfere with the ocean’s carbon sequestration cycle.
Plastic has created our modern world. I wouldn’t want the medical plastic that saves lives and holds vital fluids to go away. But plastic grocery bags? Plastic water bottles? Plastic straws? Used once and thrown away? Couldn’t we learn to live without those if we tried? And what if there were other solutions, other ways to make containers and bottles, that didn’t last forever and only needed a hot enough compost pile to turn back into soil amendments?
Citizens’ Climate Lobby and Show-Me Less Plastic invite you to explore these ideas and more––ten solutions to the plastics problem, many of them happening here in the United States, in a film called “Plastic Earth.” We’ll see circular systems where food and trash are composted on-site and used as amendments for landscaping. Sports venues are great places to do this. Even Busch Stadium has a waste composting and diversion program called “4 A Greener Game.”
Come to the “Plastic Earth” Film Event on Sunday August 30 at 2:00 pm OR Monday, August 31, at 5:30 pm at the Phelps County Courthouse Meeting Room, 200 N Main, in Rolla. The Film is free, there’ll be refreshments and a door prize of a float trip on the Meramec River. Please RSVP at https://bit.ly/4hjVoDp. Let’s solve this together!
