6. Start at home and at work. Start now. Get the fire going and it will catch. It needs to become fashionable to recycle and be earth friendly. It's also going to be a requirement for the survival of our planet and it's creatures, big and small. Wake up tomorrow and begin, it's easy. It will make you feel better about the problem too.
This is probably the best answer out there yet. Thanks.
More than reducing the production, more than gathering up what is floating out there (not that those points don't need to be addressed) recycling needs to start becoming habit for people.
We need people to become educated and stop looking at many of the plastic one-use containers we use as one-use containers. Reuse them and/or recycle them. That will help on both sides of the issue. It will reduce demand for new plastic to be produced as well as demand for oil. On the other end it will reduce the amount of plastic that gets out there. Another great way is to start charging for plastic bags at the grocery store. If you use your own bags there is no fee, but if you use the plastic bags then there is a 50 cent charge added to your bill or a dollar. Something to help move people away from using the bags. I am in the military and they started selling the reusable bags about a year ago on our base. It is amazing how many people you now see walking through the parking lot with a basket full of recyclable bags now versus plastic bags. If you can't make it less profitable for the companies to produce the plastic bags then make it more expensive for the end user to use them. It is not like your closing the end user out. You are simply nudging them towards using reusable bags.
As for some people that don't think a 50 cent or dollar charge would halt many people then you need to go to Italy. At the grocery stores there (most of them) you have to deposit somewhere between 50 cents and $1.50, in coins, into a small device on the handle of the grocery baskets to unlock one from the group. If you want your money back then you have to take the basket back and plug the key at the end of the small chain back into the pile of baskets. You would be lucky to ever find a basket anwhere except at the front of the store or collection areas in the parking lot. Much different from the parking lots here where there are baskets spread around everywhere. This is people actually doing work (walking away from their car with the basket and back) to save some pocket change. So, saving pocket change by not even leaving the counter should really appeal to them.
As for water bottles (I suspect a large part of the problem also), stop paying somebody else to bottle your water. Is it just me or is it just retarded to pay somebody for something that you can do yourself. Go get yourself a $20 faucet filter and refill your own bottles. The filter and a couple of good camping/workout drink bottles will more than pay for themselves in a couple of days over the cost of paying somebody to bottle your water for you by buying bottled water by the case. You also won't create more waste by the 25count case.
These are two areas I think/hope would make a big difference in the probem and are sooooooo easy to implement. No special grants, no added tax dollars, no extra time spent on your part. The biggest problem I had was for the first few month remembering to get my stack of bags out of the trunk at the store. Now anytime we go to ANY store, Walmart, mall, grocery store, etc, we open the trunk and take a handful of reusable bags out.
These are things we can do just to simply reduce the amount of crap we put anywhere. In the oceans in the ground, it doesn't matter. We are not going to be able to continue producing trash at an ever increasing rate without eventual consequences. The earth will get along fine without us, we won't get along all that well without the earth.
To quote a recent movie "If the earth dies you die, if you die the earth survives."
