Marcus Eriksen

“This is the cornerstone of industry strategy since World War II--eliminate the burden of costs for negative externalities. It was throw-away living in the 1950s. It was crying Indian ads in the 1970s that made consumers feel guilty about littering, distracting them from the more meaningful issue of product design. It was crushing bottle bills across the United States in the 1990s and shifting responsibility for bottle waste from industry to taxpayer-funded recycling programs. Today it's World Bank loans to small countries, so they can buy waste-to-energy incinerators to burn it all and keep new plastic production alive.”
― Marcus Eriksen, Junk Raft: An Ocean Voyage and a Rising Tide of Activism to Fight Plastic Pollution

“Contamination from plastic pollution is a terrestrial problem as much as it is a marine problem. Humans have altered the earth with roads, mines, buildings, ditches, dams, and dumps to the degree that our era deserves a name--the Anthropocene. Natural history is punctuated by changes in life, due either to rapid evolution or catastrophic extinction, and evidence of change is sometimes marked by well-preserved, widely distributed fossils. What is our fossil equivalent? Some suggest it's black carbon from the Industrial Revolution, which shows up in the seafloor and ice caps, or it's radioactive isotopes from the mid-twentieth-century nuclear tests. Now, with evidence of plastic, transported by wind and waves, blanketing Earth from the seafloor to the tops of mountains, it is arguable that plastic is the best index fossil that represents us. Even if we stop polluting the planet with plastic today, we will have to live with a layer of microplastics that will represent this moment in natural history, when a single species so deeply affected the planet for a short while.”
― Marcus Eriksen, Junk Raft: An Ocean Voyage and a Rising Tide of Activism to Fight Plastic Pollution