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America produces the greatest amount of excess in the entire world. Hundreds of millions of American laborers and businesses work to produce and consume a larger quantity of wealth and surplus than the world has ever seen. Meanwhile, about 40 million of those laborers live below the poverty line.
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It’s Fall of 2021: we’re at the tail end of the COP26 summit, an infrastructure bill chock-full of recycling funding is approaching the President’s desk, and we’ve reached a Renaissance of metal straws and bamboo toothbrushes. Perhaps we have reason to be cautiously optimistic about the state of waste reduction in America?
Perhaps not. For all of our talk about reducing waste, America’s recycling rates are shockingly low. Since 2010, recycling and composting rates have been stagnating or dropping, reaching a dismal 32% of all municipal solid waste generated in 2018. Virginia’s state elections on November 2nd resulted in a red wave washing over the Commonwealth. Democrats have enjoyed control of all three executive offices and both houses of the General Assembly since 2019 and no Republican had won a statewide race since 2009. After polls closed, Republicans had gained the governor’s, lieutenant governor's, and attorney general’s offices, and won at least 50 seats in the House of Delegates. A few races have yet to be called in the House, but Democrats have lost outright control of the House nonetheless. No Senate seats were up for election last Tuesday.
Virginia voters cast approximately 3.3 million ballots in the gubernatorial race, the highest turnout since at least 1997. About 55% of the Virginia electorate turned in early ballots or voted on election day. Former Democratic Governor Terry McAuliffe had a lead in early voting, mail-in ballots, and provisional ballots, but Republican Glenn Youngkin was able to mobilize his base on election day to swing the election in his favor. In May 2019, SpaceX, Elon Musk’s space exploration collaborative, launched a batch of small, tightly-packed Starlink Satellites. Although that first launch only contained 60 satellites, SpaceX plans to form a global network of over 42,000 Starlink satellites by the end of the decade – for context, there were roughly 4,000 total active satellites in orbit as of May 1, 2021. Thanks to a launch in mid-September, the company brought its total satellite count to almost 1800.
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