"Mismanaged plastics" is a carefully crafted marketing term, designed by global environmental groups to avoid directly challenging the powerful petrochemical industry. Mismanaged plastics simply mean litter—or more bluntly, plastics for which no one takes responsibility at the end of their life. In the United States alone, littering accounts for 19% of all plastics discarded into the environment.

Beyond individual waste, entire industries rely on plastics for daily operations without viable end-of-life solutions. Agriculture, commercial fishing, and even sport shooting (hunting and marksmanship) function in sensitive environments, where plastics are routinely left behind in fields and forests, buried in soil, or discarded at sea.

These industries continue to operate under the assumption that plastic waste will simply "disappear” when it persists for decades, fragmenting into microplastics, infiltrating ecosystems, building up within our food chain, and directly onto our dinner plates.

Until true accountability is enforced, the concept of "mismanaged plastics" will remain nothing more than a convenient way to shift blame away from those responsible for the waste crisis while still not accounting for the number of plastic bottles, caps, and straws accumulating by those who litter or “miss-managed” their plastics.

Meanwhile, continue to dispose of your failed prints into the garbage bin. Do not be tempted to send to your municipality composting bin, as these facilities are not equipped to tell the difference between a PLA and PHA. They will simply treat all plastic equally and collect them to deliver to the landfill.

Below are examples from the industry list that are found daily.

In the US alone, an estimated 83 Metric tons of discarded shotgun wads are annually sent off into the environment at the end of a barrel each year.

Discarded fishing nets and assorted materials.

And What About "Mismanaged" Plastics?