Annie Lindberg: It's raining microplastics

Our world is swimming in plastic. Since the early days of large-scale plastic production in the 1940s, plastic manufacturing has skyrocketed to total over 18 trillion pounds – more than twice the combined weight of all animals (and humans) on earth. Of that, over three quarters has become waste. Only an estimated 9 percent of that waste has been recycled; 12 percent has been burned; and the rest has been ushered to landfills or tossed into the environment. Some of it has congregated in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a plastic-berg located between California and Hawaii that is now more than twice the size of Texas.