Many of these products, such as plastic bags and food wrappers, have a lifespan of mere minutes to hours, yet they may persist in the environment for hundreds of years.Ī whale shark swims beside a plastic bag in the Gulf of Aden near Yemen.

The conveniences plastics offer, however, led to a throw-away culture that reveals the material’s dark side: today, single-use plastics account for 40 percent of the plastic produced every year. Plastics revolutionized medicine with life-saving devices, made space travel possible, lightened cars and jets-saving fuel and pollution-and saved lives with helmets, incubators, and equipment for clean drinking water. Production and development of thousands of new plastic products accelerated after World War II, so transforming the modern age that life without plastics would be unrecognizable today. Plastics made from fossil fuels are just over a century old. Plastic trash has become so ubiquitous it has prompted efforts to write a global treaty negotiated by the United Nations. But the developed world, especially in countries with low recycling rates, also has trouble properly collecting discarded plastics.

Plastic pollution is most visible in developing Asian and African nations, where garbage collection systems are often inefficient or nonexistent. Plastic pollution has become one of the most pressing environmental issues, as rapidly increasing production of disposable plastic products overwhelms the world’s ability to deal with them.

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