Imagine a remote Galapagos beach, where iguanas stomp around between fishing nets, flip flops, baseball caps and plastic bottles. Stuck in the sand is the empty packet for food sold only in Ecuador, the nearest mainland hundreds of miles away. To most people, these things are rubbish. But to archaeologists, they’re also artifacts—traces of how people live in what some call the plastic age.
Plastic waste is a toxic legacy—and an important archaeological record
