In the long run,
the facts are on the side of the optimists.
To paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., the arc of history bends toward progress. But progress doesn't just happen. People work hard to discover ways forward.
The What Works Initiative
highlights positive outcomes on difficult issues – and how people achieved them.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch floating in the Pacific between California and Hawaii – and twice the size of Texas – is more like a soup of plastic debris than an island. And it keeps getting thicker. A huge part of it is cast-off commercial fishing nets, lines, and buckets gradually deteriorating into microplastics. Not good.
But significant progress is now showing up in two ways.
First, the nonprofit The Ocean Cleanup has been ramping up its plastics cleanup exponentially. In 2025, it claims to have intercepted between 2 and 5 percent of the world’s annual plastic pollution from the waterways. At this rate of escalation, it would meet its goal “to clean up 90% of floating ocean plastic pollution by 2040.”
Meanwhile, the trade in plastic scrap sounds like recycling, but it actually sends waste to developing countries less able to keep it out of the waterways. In the past, about 5 percent of ocean plastics resulted from that trade. But since China shut down its plastic waste trade in 2018, the total trade has dropped by two-thirds. That means the remaining trade is concentrated among wealthier countries with more capacity to keep it out of the ocean.
Sources: Our World in Data; The Ocean Cleanup; PBS