Barely a week goes by without another headline about the rising tide of plastic in the ocean.
Images emerge of sea turtles feasting on plastic bags mistaken for jellyfish, of beached whales with stomachs full of plastic debris, of delicate coral reefs sprinkled with a confetti of plastic fragments.
These scenes have brought an urgency to a problem that has crept up on us over decades. A material created to last has done just that, and will continue to do so for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
Our appetite for plastics shows little sign of slowing. Since large-scale production began in the early 1950s, we’ve created more than 8.3billion tonnes of plastic and more than half of it was produced in the last 13 years.
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