Old plastics, fresh dirt.
Old plastics, fresh dirt.
Plastics composed 12% of the 250 million tons of trash Americans generated in 2010, according to the EPA. Food waste and yard trimmings, in contrast, made up 27%. Compostable plastics won’t make the problem of plastic waste magically disappear. But they can help municipalities and institutions divert organic waste away from the landfill and to the compost pile.


Biomass-derived chemical raw materials which previously derived from petroleum could one day come from crop waste.
What would it be like to swim through the estimated 100 million tons of trash swirling around in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? These photographs bring viewers as close as they'd probably ever want to come to finding out.