In June 2018 National Geographic launched Planet or Plastic?, a multi-year campaign about single-use plastic. Its most memorable part was the photography: animals tangled in bags and nets, rivers carpeted with bottles, and the people in Asia and Africa who sort the world’s plastic by hand. This page gathers 23 of those images with their photographers’ credits and explains what each one shows and why it matters.
The magazine framed the campaign around everyday items, especially bags, bottles and straws, and asked readers to sign a pledge to use fewer of them. It also changed its own habits, starting to mail some editions wrapped in paper rather than plastic film. Alongside the stories, National Geographic said its scientists would study how plastic breaks into tiny fragments and how it travels from land to the deep sea.
The photographs are best read as a set. Some show direct harm to wildlife, some show waste that escaped collection, and others show the human labour that keeps recycling running in poorer countries. Each problem has a different fix, which is why the captions below go beyond the shock of the image.
The cover that started the campaign
The June 2018 cover turned a floating shopping bag into an iceberg, with only its tip showing above the waterline. The idea is simple: the plastic we notice on beaches is a small part of what is out there. The image became the symbol of the whole campaign and was widely shared online.
Wildlife living with our plastic
At a Spanish rubbish dump, photographer John Cancalosi came across this white stork wrapped in a shopping bag, and released it. Storks in Spain and Portugal have learned to feed at rubbish dumps, which brings them into constant contact with bags and wrappers. Because plastic outlasts any animal it kills, a single bag can trap or choke more than one victim.
Jordi Chias photographed this loggerhead turtle tangled in an abandoned net in the Mediterranean off Spain; he cut it loose afterward. Lost or dumped fishing gear, known as “ghost gear,” keeps catching animals for years. Ghost nets are among the most dangerous kinds of marine debris for turtles, seals and dolphins.
On a beach in Okinawa, Japan, Shawn Miller found a hermit crab using a plastic bottle cap in place of a shell. Hermit crabs need empty shells to protect their soft bodies, and visitors who collect shells as souvenirs reduce the supply. Plastic litter is a poor substitute and offers far less protection.
Off the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, Justin Hofman watched a tiny seahorse ride the current while gripping a plastic cotton swab instead of seaweed. Hofman later called it “a photo I wish didn’t exist.” The picture was a finalist in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition and became one of the most shared images of ocean pollution.
In this image by David Higgins, a young monkey investigates a discarded water bottle. National Geographic used it to illustrate the scale of bottled-drink sales: close to a million plastic beverage bottles are sold around the world every minute. Animals living near people now treat this waste as part of their landscape.
Spotted hyenas pick through a rubbish dump in Harar, Ethiopia, in this photograph by Brian Lehmann. Harar is known for a long tradition of people feeding hyenas, and the animals have also learned to follow garbage trucks. It is a picture of wild animals adjusting to a landscape that is increasingly made of our trash.
A sea turtle and a manta ray swim through water littered with floating debris in this image credited to John Johnson. Turtles can mistake plastic bags and fragments for jellyfish and other food. Large filter feeders such as mantas swallow small particles along with the plankton they strain from the water.
Praveen Balasubramanian photographed this heron with plastic caught in its bill. A 2015 study estimated that, if trends continued, nearly every seabird species would be eating plastic by 2050. Birds feeding in polluted rivers and estuaries face the same risk as those far out at sea.
Bottles, packaging and waste that escapes
A man wades through a field of discarded plastic in this photograph credited to Jayed Hasen. Packaging is the largest single market for plastic today and makes up close to half of all plastic waste. Most of it is used once, briefly, and then thrown away.
In autumn 2017 the Madrid art collective Luzinterruptus filled the Cibeles fountain and two other city fountains with about 60,000 discarded bottles, captured here by Randy Olson. The installation was meant to make the volume of single-use bottles visible in the heart of the city. Seeing the bottles piled together made a number that is usually abstract suddenly physical.
A diver gathers plastic from the seabed in this image by David Jones. Hundreds of marine species are known to have swallowed plastic or become tangled in it; National Geographic cited about 700 in 2018, and later reviews put the figure above 900. Clean-ups like this help locally, but they cannot keep up with new waste unless less plastic leaks in the first place.
Abdul Hakim photographed a waterway clogged with floating rubbish. Researchers estimate that by 2015 humans had made about 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic, of which about 6.3 billion had become waste. Roughly 9 percent of that waste was recycled, 12 percent burned and the rest left in landfills or the environment.
The people who sort the world’s plastic
Beneath a bridge over an arm of Bangladesh’s Buriganga River, a family strips labels from bottles and separates green plastic from clear, photographed by Randy Olson. Sorted bottles sell for more to scrap dealers. National Geographic reported that waste pickers there earned around $100 a month.
At dawn in Kalyan, on the edge of Mumbai, India, waste pickers start their rounds of a huge dump while birds circle overhead. In the background, garbage trucks from the city cross the landfill. Randy Olson noted that the woman carrying a red cloth lives on the site itself.
In Dhaka, Bangladesh, a woman named Noorjahan spreads washed plastic sheets to dry while looking after her young son, Momo. Once dry, the plastic is sold to recyclers. Globally, less than a fifth of plastic is recycled, and much of that work depends on informal labour like hers.
Hand-sorted plastic chips in bright colours dry on the banks of the Buriganga River. National Geographic reported that about 120,000 people work in informal recycling in and around Dhaka, a city of some 18 million that produces roughly 11,000 tons of waste a day. Their work keeps a great deal of plastic out of the river, often in unhealthy conditions.
In Valenzuela, Philippines, a worker climbs a truck stacked with bottles bound for a recycling yard. The bottles were picked from the streets of Metro Manila and sold through scrap dealers before reaching this plant. Here they are shredded and sold further up the chain, often for export.
Workers sit among a mountain of plastic bottles in another of Randy Olson’s photographs for the campaign. Images like this show that recycling is not automatic: someone has to collect, sort and clean each item by hand. When that labour is cheap and unprotected, the environmental benefit comes at a human cost.
Recycling plants, shops and the growth of plastic
Inside Recology’s largest recycling plant in San Francisco, which handled 500 to 600 tons of material a day at the time. It was one of the few US plants that accepted plastic shopping bags. National Geographic reported that it had more than doubled the tonnage it recycles over 20 years.
Richard John Seymour photographed a shop stacked floor to ceiling with inflatable toys and plastic balls. Cheap, colourful products like these are made to be used for a season and then discarded. Most are made from plastics that are rarely recycled.
A second view by Seymour shows rows of inflatable rings and pool toys. Together the two images make a point about volume: the problem is not only litter but how much short-lived plastic we produce in the first place.
This chart by Jason Treat and Ryan Williams traces global plastic production by industry from the 1950s onward, based on research from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Production barely existed before the Second World War and has grown almost every decade since. Packaging is by far the largest and shortest-lived use.
This short National Geographic video explains the science behind plastic and why it lasts so long in the environment.
The numbers behind the photos
Several captions in the campaign quoted statistics that are still widely repeated, so it helps to know where they come from. The production and recycling shares come from a 2017 study led by Roland Geyer at UC Santa Barbara, which estimated cumulative plastic production up to 2015. National Geographic’s figure of about 6.9 billion tons of waste was in short tons; in metric tons the same estimate is about 6.3 billion.
The often quoted “nine million tons a year” entering the ocean is a rounded version of a 2015 estimate that put the range between 4.8 and 12.7 million metric tons from coastal countries in 2010. It is a range, not a precise measurement, and newer studies use different methods. Treat all these numbers as snapshots of their time rather than current totals.
Where the global plastics treaty stands
Since the campaign began, governments have tried to agree a legally binding treaty on plastic pollution. Talks started in Uruguay in late 2022 and were meant to finish in Busan, South Korea, at the end of 2024, but no agreement was reached. A further round in Geneva in August 2025 also ended without a deal, with countries split over limits on production, chemicals of concern and funding. A short session in early 2026 was mainly procedural and chose a new chair rather than moving the text forward.
What actually helps
The photos suggest three different kinds of action. Ghost nets and wildlife entanglement call for better fishing-gear management and recovery. Bottles in rivers and dumps call for working waste collection, which billions of people still lack. Mountains of short-lived products call for making and buying less single-use plastic in the first place.
For individuals, the most reliable steps are the boring ones: carry a reusable bottle and bag, avoid products with needless packaging, and support local collection and deposit schemes. None of these solves the problem alone, but each reduces the flow of plastic that ends up in pictures like these.
Sources: Photographs and original captions: National Geographic, “We Depend on Plastic. Now, We’re Drowning in It” (June 2018), National Geographic June 2018 press release and National Geographic plastic facts; photographers Randy Olson, Jayed Hasen, Jordi Chias, Shawn Miller, John Cancalosi, Justin Hofman, David Higgins, Brian Lehmann, David Jones, John Johnson, Praveen Balasubramanian, Abdul Hakim and Richard John Seymour; chart by Jason Treat and Ryan Williams with data from UC Santa Barbara. Background: Wikipedia: Plastic pollution; Wikipedia: Global plastic pollution treaty; Gary E. Knell’s comments on the launch were reported by the Daily Mail.
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