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Half of All Plastic That Has Ever Existed Was Made in the Past 13 Years

Plastic production is rapidly accelerating, according to an ambitious new paper—but only 9 percent of it gets recycled.
Source: Kim Kyung Hoon / Reuters

In 2014, scientists found a new kind of of “stone” on the beaches of Hawaii. It was made of sand, organic debris, volcanic rock, all swirled together with melted plastic. So they proposed the name “plastiglomerate” and they suggested that, as plastic lasts pretty much forever, these stones could be a marker of the anthropocene in the rock record. In the future, our time might be defined by our use of plastics.

Which is not particularly hard to

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