Irish Examiner view: Everest of plastic must be tackled

United Nations Environment Programme says the world is dumping the equivalent of a rubbish truck of plastic into the seas every minute of every day

Litter, including many plastics, washed up on a beach in Co Cork.

Plastic has been a miracle of modern invention. Like so many such innovations, it has a dark side.

Plastics, we now know, course through our bodies and those of millions of sea, air, and land-bound animals; they have been found in vast quantities in our oceans, even in the Arctic Sea, mountains, and lakes.