The world’s waste problem is growing fast

In “Our Mutual Friend”, Charles Dickens’s last complete novel, stray paper “hangs on every bush, flutters in every tree, is caught flying by the electric wires, haunts every enclosure”. Since those words were published in the 1860s, the world’s waste problem has changed in both scale and composition. These days plastic in one form or another is strewn on verges, clogs rivers and swirls around oceans in vast gyres. Circulated by winds and tides, tiny nanoplastics have penetrated all manner of watery ecosystems, reaching both the Earth’s poles and its highest peaks, with unknown consequences for the planet.