Hard-to-die plastic: PET bottles linger for centuries and seed microplastics globally

A PET water bottle takes about 450 years to decompose; since the 1970s essentially every bottle produced remains somewhere on Earth, gradually fragmenting into microplastics that are now found from Arctic ice to deep Mariana Trench sediments, while global plastic production continues and most of it remains unrecycled, ensuring centuries of pollution as plastics persist and disperse through air, water, and soils.