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HUTTERSTOCKplastic for every foot of coastline in the world,”
she says. “If you imagine us all standing, hand-to-
hand, covering the coastline of the entire world,
this is what’s in front of each one of us.”
Marine plastics picked up by the currents col-
lect in massive ocean “gyres” — the Great Pacif-
ic Garbage Patch is now twice the size of Texas.
These are swirling petrochemical spills, but un-
like crude oil, the long molecular chains in plas-
tics don’t exist in nature and don’t meaningful-
ly biodegrade. “The same properties that make
plastics so versatile,” the Science Advances au-
thors, including Jambeck, write, “make these
materials difficult or impossible for nature to as-
similate.” Instead, bulk plastics wear down into
microplastics — a category for particles small-
er than 5 millimeters, or roughly the width of
your pinkie fingernail — deteriorating further into
nanoplastic particles.
In the open water, plastics are consumed by
fish, seabirds, and mammals —
which are washing up dead in
harrowing numbers. Last year,
whales in Italy and the Philip-
pines died just weeks apart,
their stomachs packed with in-
digestible plastic bags. In De-
cember, a sperm whale washed
ashore in Scotland with more
than 200 pounds of plastic in
its gut. The pollution visible on
the ocean surface represents
just one percent of what humans
have dumped into the oceans.
The rest lies beneath, including
seven miles deep in the Mariana
Trench, where researchers have
spotted plastic bags and mea-
sured microplastics at concen-
trations of 2,000 parts per liter.
Without dramatic change, the amount of plastics
entering the oceans every year, already intoler-
able, is projected to more than double by 2025.
The story on dry land is hardly more com-
forting. Plastics are widely used in agriculture
and “microplastic pollution is somewhere be-
tween four and 23 times higher in the soil than
in the sea,” says Lili Fuhr, editor of Plastic Atlas,
which documents the reach of global plastic pol-
lution. Microplastics, thought to be carried by
the winds, have been found in pristine terrestri-
al environments, including the polar ice caps. In
Colorado, plastic fibers have been discovered in
precipitation. “It’s in the rain, it’s in the snow,”
lamented United States Geological Survey re-
searcher Greg Wetherbee. “It’s a part of our en-
vironment now.” Even landfills may be creat-
ing long-term hazards. A 2019 study in Water
Research found microplastic contamination as
high as 24 parts per liter in landfill runoff, offer-
ing “preliminary evidence... that landfill isn’t
the final sink of plastics,” the researchers wrote,
“but a potential source of microplastics.”
This pollution is planetwide, impossible to
fully remediate, and threatens to disrupt natural
systems — including those that allow the oceans
to remove carbon from the atmosphere. “Hu-
mans are conducting a singular uncontrolled ex-
periment on a global scale,” write the researchersin Science Advances, “in which billions of metric
tons of material will accumulate across all major
terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems on the planet.”
We are all guinea pigs in this experiment, as
plastics accumulate in the food web, appearing
in seafood, table salt, and ironically even in bot-
tled water. Many plastics are mixed with a toxic
brew of colorants, flame retardants, and plasti-
cizers. Joe Vaillancourt is the CEO of a compa-
ny that refines waste plastic into fuel — a pro-
cess that requires removing such contaminants
from curbside recycling. “In one little 10-pound
batch,” he says, “we found a thousand different
chemicals.” Some of these additives are linked
to cancer and severe health problems. As plas-
tics break down over time, they can also absorb
toxins from the environment, including PCBs.
The threat to human health is complex and
poorly understood. “There are a lot more ques-
tions than answers at this point,” says MarkHahn, a toxicologist at Woods
Hole Oceanographic Institu-
tion who studies microplas-
tics. Some plastic likely pass-
es through the human gut like
so much sand, he says. But
scientists have found that tiny
plastic particles can insinu-
ate themselves into the bloodstream of mussels
and the organs of fish. Airborne nanoplastics can
also be inhaled into the lungs. “Are they lodging
somewhere and physically blocking something,
or causing an inflammatory reaction,” Hahn asks,
“or are they carrying their additives and contam-
inants and delivering them somewhere — you
know, to the brain?” Hahn, a sober and skepti-
cal scientist, is concerned about the rising tide
of plastic in the environment. “If there is a prob-
lem now,” he says, “it’s only going to get worse.”T
HE STORY of how we got into this fix
is short, modern — and American as
hell. In the late 1860s, a bush-beard-
ed inventor in New York sought to
claim a $10,000 prize by developing
an alternative to ivory. With a primitive polymer,
John Wesley Hyatt created — and later peddled to
the consuming public — plastic billiard balls,
piano keys, and false teeth.Plastics were industrialized in the early 1900s
by Leo Baekeland, a Belgian immigrant whose
Bakelite polymer withstood high temperatures
and insulated against electricity. Touted as “the
material of a thousand uses” — its logo a “B”
floating above the mathematical symbol for in-
finity — Bakelite became integral to the automo-
tive and electric industries, as well as to consum-
er goods like dominoes, telephone receivers, and
78 rpm records.
Plastics wove themselves deeper into Ameri-
can life with the invention of nylon in the 1930s.
And their versatility made them indispensable
to the military in World War II, featuring in para-
chutes, tires, and Plexiglas windows. Plastics
boomed as a hallmark of America’s postwar con-
sumer culture, yet this material of abundance
also became a marker of soulless excess that hor-
rified Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Gradu-
ate when buttonholed about his future career
prospects at a party — and pitched on “Plastics...
There’s a great future in plastics.”
The virtues of plastic are as real now as they
were then. “Plastic allows us to do more with
less,” insists Steve Russell, vice president of the
Plastics Division at the American Chemistry
Council, which represents petrochemical com-
panies. (Russell announced his retirement in
early 2020.) “Whether it’s to make cars light-
er so they use less energy or buildings more ef-
ficient. They allow us to deliver a safe and san-
itary drinking water through plastic pipes that
don’t corrode.” Pointing to the pervasive use of
plastics in medicine, he highlights their peerless
“benefits of hygiene and health and safety.”
Yet beyond this slate of essential, durable, or
technically demanding cases, plastic has also
twinned itself to modern throwaway culture. As
much as 40 percent of plastics produced today
go into packaging. The Graduate debuted in 1967,
and that era marks a pivot point for the indus-
try. At the First National Conference of Packag-
ing Wastes in 1969, Dow Chemical’s chief envi-
ronmental manager presented a paper on the
explosive growth of single-use plastics in “cafe-
terias... universities, hospitals, airlines, restau-
rants, etc.” While praising the performance of
these “durable materials that might conceivably
last forever,” he sounded an alarm about “dis-
posal problems.” He foresaw a coming deluge of
plastic waste and called out the industry for turn-
ing a blind eye — “and there are those who have
elected to do just that.” He insisted that inciner-
ation was the “ultimate solution,” but confessed,
“It’s going to cost somebody a lot of money.”
Far from financing a solution for plastic waste,
the broader corporate response was to fund pub-
lic relations blaming consumers for the pollu-
tion instead. Keep America Beautiful — a non-
profit quietly funded by industry — began airing
famous public-service announcements in 1971 of
a crying “Indian” (actually a spaghetti- Western
star) paddling through waters strewn with re-
fuse like styrofoam cups, with the tag line “Peo-
ple start pollution. People can stop it.”
In fact, KAB had been founded to head off
state bans on single-use packaging, according
to notes reviewed by ROLLING STONE. And in-
dustry boosters from the era were proclaimingDEATH BY PLASTIC
A seabird suffocated
by plastic. The oceans
have suffered the worst
pollution, with plastic
found seven miles deep
in the Mariana Trench.8
2PLANET PLASTIC
ROLLING STONE