Plastic pollution
Plastic pollution is the accumulation, leakage, or release of plastic products, particles, and waste into terrestrial, freshwater, marine, and atmospheric environments across the plastic life cycle. It includes macroplastics and microplastics and the resulting environmental, health, social, and economic harms. Prevention addresses design, production, consumption, waste management, releases, and remediation.
In simple terms
Plastic pollution is broader than visible litter on beaches. Large items can entangle or be ingested by wildlife, fragment into microplastics, block drainage, and move between land, rivers, oceans, air, and food systems. Losses can occur during production, transport, use, collection, recycling, disposal, and the degradation of products. Additives and other associated chemicals can also matter. The United Nations Environment Assembly frames the issue across the full plastic life cycle, while measures such as the EU Single-Use Plastics Directive target Single-use plastic products and other pathways within that wider problem.
Why it matters
Plastic is persistent, mobile, and used at enormous scale. Once dispersed, recovery can be technically difficult and costly, and some particles cannot be fully removed. Effective action therefore combines upstream prevention, product and system redesign, reduced avoidable use, controlled production losses, reuse, collection, safe recycling and disposal, and focused cleanup without assuming that downstream cleanup alone solves continued leakage.
Example
A city finds bottles and food containers in waterways, tyre-wear particles in runoff, lost resin pellets near industrial sites, and fragments in coastal sediment. Its response sets pellet-loss controls, improves collection, expands practical reuse, targets frequently littered single-use products, filters priority runoff, and cleans hotspots while measuring whether releases actually decline.
How it differs
Single-use plastic
Single-use plastic describes products intended for one or very limited uses; plastic pollution is the wider release and accumulation of plastics of many product types and sizes across their life cycle.