Plastic

Plastic is a fast-growing segment of U.S. municipal solid waste, and most of it ends up in the environment. Just 9% of plastic collected in municipal solid waste was recycled as of 2018, the most recent year for which national data is available. The rest was burned in waste-to-energy plants or buried in landfills. Manufacturers assert that better recycling is the optimal way to reduce plastic pollution. But critics argue that the industry often exaggerates how readily items can actually be recycled. In September 2024, beverage company Keurig Dr Pepper was fined US$1.5 million for inaccurately claiming that its K-Cup coffee pods were recyclable after two large recycling companies said they could not process the cups. California is suing ExxonMobil, accusing the company of falsely promoting plastic products as recyclable. Environmental law scholar Patrick Parenteau explains why claims about recyclability have confused consumers, and how forthcoming guidelines from the U.S. Federa...

As a conservation biologist who studies plastic ingestion by marine wildlife, I can count on the same question whenever I present research: “How does plastic affect the animals that eat it?” This is one of the biggest questions in this field, and the verdict is still out. However, a recent study from the Adrift Lab, a group of Australian and international scientists who study plastic pollution, adds to a growing body of evidence that ingesting plastic debris has discernible chronic effects on the animals that consume it. This work represents a crucial step: moving from knowing that plastic is everywhere to diagnosing its effects once ingested. From individual to species-level effects There’s wide agreement that the world is facing a plastic pollution crisis. This deluge of long-lived debris has generated gruesome photos of dead seabirds and whales with their stomachs full of plastic. But while consuming plastic likely killed these individual animals, death...

I am obsessed with plastic objects. I harvest them from the ocean for the stories they hold and to mitigate their ability to harm. Each object has the potential to be a message from the sea – a poem, a cipher, a metaphor, a warning. My work collecting and photographing ocean plastic and turning it into art began with an epiphany in 2005, on a far-flung beach at the southern tip of the Big Island of Hawaii. At the edge of a black lava beach pounded by surf, I encountered multitudes upon multitudes of plastic objects that the angry ocean was vomiting onto the rocky shore. I could see that somehow, impossibly, humans had permeated the ocean with plastic waste. Its alien presence was so enormous that it had reached this most isolated point of land in the immense Pacific Ocean. I felt I was witness to an unspeakable crime against nature, and needed to document it and bring back evidence. I began cleaning the beach, hauling away weathered and misshapen plastic debris ̵...