One man’s trash is another man’s bench.

The Evans City Lions Club is on a mission to turn soft plastic waste — shopping bags, beverage bottles, cellophane and other items — into public benches to be used throughout the borough.

The club is asking residents to drop off the items to be shipped to a Virginia-based company, which will turn the waste into benches at no cost.

Lions Club secretary Shelley Natali said the response to the program has been impressive. In the first week of collections, residents dropped off 84 pounds of plastics.

“It’s just coming in leaps and bounds,” she said.

It is part of the club’s long-term project to keep plastic out of landfills. Businesses providing free collection points will be the first to be offered benches for outside their establishments. “We’re getting a lot of businesses that are stepping up to help out,” Natali said.

The mass production of plastics, which began just six decades ago, has accelerated so rapidly that it has created 8.3 billion metric tons — most of it in disposable products that end up as trash, according to National Geographic.

The U.S. EPA says our nation produces about 34.5 million tons of plastic each year.

Only 9 percent of that is recycled, and 12 percent is incinerated. The vast majority — 79 percent — is accumulating in landfills or sloughing off in the natural environment as litter.

Plastic takes more than 400 years to degrade, so most of it still exists in some form.

Widespread use of plastics has surpassed all other man-made materials except steel and cement. If this global trend in production continues, we will have produced 34 billion tons of plastic by 2050 (100 times greater than the weight of all the humans on the planet, four times more than we have made to date. Forty-six percent of it — about 15 billion tons — is expected to be discarded in landfills or the natural environment.

The company that will produce the benches for the Evans City Lions Club, Trex, sponsors local recycling programs in universities, schools and communities throughout the nation. If a group can collect more than 500 pounds of plastic refuse in a six-month span (about 40,500 plastic bags), it will donate a high-performance composite bench to the school or community.

It seems like a no-brainer for area school districts and communities to follow the lead of the Evan City Lions Club to institute similar recycling programs.

The amount of plastic waste blanketing the planet is overwhelming, but every effort to reduce it — no matter how small the scale — should be considered.