The Plastic Predicament Try to get through a day without using plastic. For that matter, try to go just one hour without it. From food and drink packages to cell phones and toothbrushes, plastic is nearly impossible to avoid. You can’t even turn on a light without flicking a plastic switch.
Oene Moedt/Foto Natura/Minden Pictures A seagull is entangled in plastic six-pack ring. Plastic doesn’t exist in nature. It’s created from chemicals. Mass production of plastic started in the 1940s. Since then, it has become supremely popular—and for good reason. Plastic is lightweight, cheap, and convenient. It also lasts for a very long time. That can be good—you don’t want your laptop to fall apart as you type—but it can be bad too. Plastic can remain in the environment for hundreds or even thousands of years. It piles up, filling garbage dumps and polluting the land and the ocean. Each year, more than 300 million tons of new plastic are manufactured worldwide. Clearly, we have a plastic problem. Trash Soup Natural products such as food, paper, and wood are biodegradable [bigh-oh-di-GRAY- duh-buhl]; they’re broken down by bacteria and are absorbed by the environment. Plastic, on the other hand, is photodegradable. Light from the sun causes it to break into smaller pieces over time. It never degrades completely, however. It often winds up littering the land and the ocean. In the Pacific Ocean, plastic waste has collected in a swirling “soup” of trash called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It’s huge—four times as big as Texas! It’s just one example of an ocean garbage patch. Plastic pollutes all the world’s seas. The United Nations