Plastic pollution is now considered one of the largest environmental threats facing humans and animals.The material is made to last much longer than a human lifetime, but that also means its impact on the planet lasts a lifetime too.Forty percent of all plastic, water bottles, bags, straws, and utensils, are used only one time before being discarded.Amna Nawaz and producer Lorna Baldwin kick off a series this week about our global plastics problem.And a warning: Viewers may find some of the images involving injured animals disturbing.Along coasts across the globe, waves of plastic are washing ashore.This beach in the Dominican Republic is inundated every day.This stretch of sand on Australia's Christmas Island is swamped by debris.Plastic is clogging landfills from Thailand to Kenya. Why?Plastic is virtually indestructible, and it doesn't break down easily.But there are also so many different types of plastic, it can be hard or in some cases impossible to recycle.And yet, around the world, our appetite for plastic keeps on growing.More than nine billion metric tons of plastic has been produced since 1950,the weight equivalent of 27,000 Empire State Buildings or more than a billion elephants.Roland Geyer at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is an industrial ecologist who quantified the problem.
