Many years ago I was walking in the small port of Cordova, Alaska when I came upon a lot of young men in break-up boots (Alaska version of Wellys or Gumboots) and weatherproof long pants, busily chopping up bits of floating ice from glaciersl 'Turned out they were harvesing clear 'pure' ice for shippng out BY AIR AS ICE. This had been marketed specifically to Japan as something unspoiled to include in your glass of Suntory.

Much later, a travelling exhibit of seawater pollution specifically by water made it to the Anchorage Museum. It made a permanent mark in my memory of how distributed this problem was and is. The exhibited highlighted huge areas (Texas sized) in the oceans where wind and currents concentrated plastic pollution. This happened about twenty years ago, and the more information that has been gathered about the presence of plastics and micro-plastics at all places and depths the problem has been determined as more prevalent and hard to fix than we thought of.

The base lesson is similar to that of identifying renewable power sources. In that, the less power you need, the less you need to despoil the landscape. Similarly the less plastic you produce, the less will spread into the environment.

Clarke and Dawe on climate change (15 years or more ago)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFqGdK3bSX0