‘Deluge of plastic waste’: US is world’s biggest plastic polluter

At 42m metric tons of plastic waste a year, the US generates more waste than all EU countries combined

The US is the world's biggest culprit in generating plastic waste and the country urgently needs a new strategy to curb the vast amount of plastic that ends up in the oceans, a new report submitted to the federal government has found.

The advent of cheap, versatile plastics has created a global scale deluge of plastic waste seemingly everywhere we look", the report states, with the US a leading contributor of disposable plastics that ends up entangling and choking marine life, harming ecosystems and bringing harmful pollution up through the food chain.