Trash Talk: Don’t Kick the Can Down the Road

Let’s talk trash—and be pragmatic about recycling.

Recycling has only a recent history in this country. The plastic industry emerged in the 1950s, and two decades later we were being inundated with plastic products of all sorts. In the 1970s we began to hear “reduce, reuse and recycle.” A half century later, we are still asking whether we are buried in our own trash.

Will we ever be able to reverse