A single plastic water bottle takes about 450 years to decompose — meaning every bottle produced since the 1970s is still essentially intact somewhere on Earth, slowly breaking down into particles now found in Arctic ice, Pyrenees rainfall, and the sediments of the Mariana Trench

The plastic water bottle is one of the more recent inventions in the history of human packaging. The polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottle, the standard clear plastic container that holds bottled water, soft drinks, and a wide range of other liquids, was first patented in 1973 by Nathaniel Wyeth, a mechanical engineer at DuPont. The product [...] The post A single plastic water bottle takes about 450 years to decompose — meaning every bottle produced since the 1970s is still essentially intact