Try this: Write a list of every piece of plastic you touch in a day. I did it. I stopped counting at 56 items. Plastic is to our time what wood was for millennia. But unlike wood, most plastic doesn’t go away. It ends up as trash in streets, rivers, lakes and oceans.

News stories feature dead whales and turtles with stomachs full of plastic. Activists built a huge floating net to collect it (which recently failed). Concerned citizens clean up beaches. But that’s not helping much. Eight million tons of plastic wash into oceans every year.

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NPR (14:52)