The Plastic Issue

FOREVER IS A LONG TIME.

|Estimates for how long plastic endures range from 450 years to forever.

It’s not unusual to see an iceberg on the cover of National Geographic. But take another look at this month’s cover, and you’ll see there’s something else beneath the surface. Plastic. A lot of plastic.

18 billion pounds of plastic ends up in the ocean each year.
And stays there.

|More than 40% of plastic produced is used once. And then tossed.

The largest market for plastics today is in packaging materials. Once disposed of, it breaks down into smaller fragments that linger for centuries.

To ride currents, seahorses clutch natural debris. But in the polluted waters off the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, this seahorse latched onto a plastic cotton swab. Subscribe now ›

|Around the world, nearly a million plastic bottles are sold every minute.

Plastic takes a tragic toll on our wildlife. Some animals now are surrounded by it. They eat it, get stuck in it and die from it.

In the Mediterranean off Spain, this loggerhead turtle was snared in an old plastic fishing net. It was able to stretch its neck above water to breathe, but would have died had the photographer not freed it. Subscribe now ›

|100 trillion plastic bags are used worldwide every year.

The “working life” of a plastic bag is just 15 minutes. And sadly, a single bag can kill more than once in the wild, where it can choke or trap again.

At a landfill in Spain, a stork entangled with a plastic bag was freed by the photographer. Subscribe now ›

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