Closing the Loop - ON PLASTIC WASTE IN THE U.S. AND CHINA

The Center’s mission is to commemorate the ideals and concerns of Woodrow Wilson by providing a link between the worlds of ideas and policy, while fostering research, study, discussion, and collaboration among a broad spectrum of individuals concerned with policy and scholarship in national and international affairs. [...] • The Plastic Pipeline: A Serious Game for Plastic Reduction Education is an educational video game project created in partnership with the Wilson Center’s Serious Games Initiative that aims to bring the complex world of plastic policy to the fingertips of people around the world and to spread knowledge about the sources of and solutions to plastic waste leakage. [...] Yet when we were looking for statistics on plastic produc- The stats in this first infographic tion and waste in the United States captures production and waste of all and China, it was a struggle to find types of plastic in the two countries. [...] So instead of a sprint with four to six op-ed authors as in the past, these two plastic-themed InsightOut issues have been marathons! Clare Auld-Brokish and Tongxin Zhu were the initial manag- ing editors of this issue in 2020 and 2021 and a team of other research interns have picked up the task since and helped to get it to the finish line. [...] Instead of a waste policy ocean plastics and increasingly aware of that reacts to problematic materials after the global injustices of impacts from waste the fact, we need an agile system that disposal, EPR can incentivize and reward can adapt to the ever-changing packag- reuse, recycling, and the production of ing landscape.