Go to any waterway in the US and you will find it. Plastic bottles, bottle caps, chip bags, cpu lids, straws, milk jugs, food containers, chewing tobacco cans, lighters, ping pong balls, syringes, milk crates, fishing line, bobbers, clothes hangers, insulation, O-rings, tires, fishing nets, pens, pen caps, grocery bags, six pack rings, chew toys, fake flowers, buckets, handles, 55 gallon drums, soccer balls, the broken plastic housing of almost any consumer product you can imagine.
I have with my bare hands picked up over 500 bags of this shit off coastlines and waterways and highways on three different continents. Based on my experience, every single mile of ocean coastline and nearly every waterway is littered with plastic waste to a greater or lesser degree.
The problem is so bad that unless you are in a national park a hundred miles from civilization, you cannot walk more than 100 feet along a waterway without seeing some kind of garbage, unless someone has specifically detrashed there, thoroughly, in the past week. The water is full of our junk.
> Don’t get me started on plastic straws. They make up 0.03% of plastic waste in the ocean.
The tone of this comment really raised my hackles. I'm not going to unload on you, but I am so tempted to right now. But holy shit, if you'd dragged 5 tons of shit out of the creek you'd not complain from behind your keyboard that they want to take your stupid straws away.
I say ban all single-use plastic.