Plastic pollution has infiltrated every ecosystem in every ocean on the planet, but perhaps the most iconic organisms impacted are the whales. The problem is monumental. For example, consider the blue whale. Our most optimistic estimates put the global blue whale population size at about 25,000 individuals (down 89 percent since before commercial whaling began in 1911). Based on recent estimates, an amount of plastic waste equivalent to about 3.5 times the weight of the entire blue whale population is put into the ocean every year. That staggering figure alone is enough to make one feel, well, blue, but the devastating impact is underscored by the now-familiar images of deceased whales—their guts bursting with plastic bags or completely entangled in derelict or discarded plastic fishing gear.

After China issued its plastic waste import ban in January 2018, global plastic waste shipments were quickly rerouted to Southeast Asia, with Malaysia as a top recipient. Like bamboo sprouts after the rain, illegal plastic recycling facilities quickly popped up in Malaysia. To stay under the radar, some operators set up recycling plants and waste dumpsites in oil palm plantations. 

“What bothers me is that people tend to look at these rivers and these polluted beaches and think ‘somebody needs to clean it up’—that’s just completely wrong. Because not only is it almost impossible and inefficient, but it’s really not the solution. The solution is prevention,” says Tiza Mafira in the film, Story of Plastic, as she takes a boat trip down the polluted Ci Liwung River that flows through Indonesia’s capital city, Jakarta.

China’s 2018 National Sword Policy ended the country’s role as the recycling bin for the world’s post-consumer plastic scrap and threw global recycling markets into disarray. Reeling on the other side of the globe, American cities were forced to store, incinerate, or throw collected recyclables into landfills. Faced with a rapidly diminishing landfill capacity, China is consolidating and formalizing its domestic recycling industry, an expensive and daunting task.

If you watched Finding Nemo (who hasn’t?), you may remember Nemo’s home in the beautiful pink sea anemone with its tentacles waving around. These tentacles are able to sting and eat fish, crabs, and sometimes even birds. Lucky for Nemo, clownfish have a mucus coat that protects them from the sea anemone’s poisonous stings. And lucky for the sea anemone, clownfish protect them from being consumed by other fish and provide them nutrients through their food and fecal droppings. Nemo and his fellow clownfish, however, can’t shield these sedentary sea animals from nearly invisible plastic microfibers or plastic preproduction pellets, called nurdles. At Duke University I have been studying one specific species of sea anemone, Aiptasia pallida, which seems to find plastic particularly tasty. My work is part of a larger wave of scientific research around the world looking into how and why sea animals are eating microplastics and how it may impact their health.

In Bangdong Village, Yunnan, Matthew Chitwood wanted to do his part to keep the stunning mountainous area clean during his two-year residency as a China fellow at the Institute of Current World Affairs. One day he took his empty beer bottles to a local convenience shop for recycling, but the owners would not accept them. He was told to dump them over the embankment. Looking down the slope at the accumulated piles of broken furniture, soggy socks, food waste, and crushed soda cans entangled with plastic bags, Matt refused. Later, Matt’s friends flung his bottles into the gully. He related his frustrating recycling attempt to Mao Da, the founder of China Zero Waste Alliance, who told Matt that “rural trash management itself is a misnomer… It’s really just trash relocation.”

In the crowded capital city of Manila, the Philippines, one quarter of the population of 15 million people has less than one dollar to spend per day. Residents depend upon the tiny and ubiquitous convenience stores, known as sari-sari stores, for daily essentials like food and hygiene products, much of which are sold in convenient single-use sachets (small plastic pouches) for just a few cents each. These sari-sari stores are the major source of the 150 million sachets used daily in the Philippines.