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People, wildlife, planet pay cost of convenience for single-use plastics

A plastic layer in Earth’s geological record may become our legacy, marking a moment we turned into a single-use planet.

A sculpture of a bottle-nosed dolphin filled with bottles and other plastic trash collected from the beach of St. Simons Island, Ga., in the Southeastern United States.
A sculpture of a bottle-nosed dolphin filled with bottles and other plastic trash collected from the beach of St. Simons Island, Ga., in the Southeastern United States. (RPowers/AN)

WASHINGTON (AN) – Birds eat it until they rattle. Fish get so entangled in it that they sink and die. It’s found at Earth’s extremes, and as you read this it’s coursing through your bloodstream, probably doing damage that scientists are only now coming to be understand.

"Plastics … there’s a great future in plastics," Mr. McGuire famously tells a bewildered Benjamin Braddock in the 1967 film The Graduate. "Think about it. Will you think about it?"

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