Environmental experts warn that our planet is drowning in plastic. The world’s cities produce 2 billion tons of trash every year. By the year 2050, that number is expected to rise to 3 billion tons. The World Bank estimates that the largest amount of trash today, about 44 percent, is plastic. This information comes from a 2018 World Bank report called Trends in Solid Waste Management. But we often have to buy packaged goods. And often that packaging is made of plastic. Now, that may be changing. A new environmentally-friendly shopping model was recently launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. This shopping model, called Loop, aims to replace throwaway containers with reusable ones. This is part of what some people call the zero-waste movement. The main belief driving this movement is that much of the trash we create is unnecessary. Loop is the idea of TerraCycle, an American-based recycling company.
