Plastic bag use is on the increase and that's very
disappointing. After a dip in individual bag use from 2002 to
2009, last year we were back up to getting through 475m a month.
But that's so like plastic. Doug Woodring is a campaigner on
oceanic plastic litter and the architect of a new "solution"
called the Plastic Disclosure Project, in which companies report
and reduce their plastic use, similar to carbon reduction
programmes. According to him, the plastic problem snuck up on
us, "with plastic waste building up in our environment without
us really noticing". Visceral manifestations of this are
enormous vortices of plastic trash in the world's oceans;
Woodring's team analysed the North Pacific Gyre
(projectkaisei.org), thousands of acres of floating plastic in
various stages of degradation (fragmented plastic is then
ingested by wildlife). What troubles environmentalists is that
the infrastructure for dealing with plastic waste is not
equipped to deal with the huge surge in its use; and individual
use is p