Finding Genius: Understanding Microplastics: Brilliant Insights from 50+ Experts in Plastic Pollution, Public Health, Ecology, Toxicology, Bioengineering, and More

Two thousand four hundred miles from the east coast of North America, 373 miles of ocean bejeweled by nine volcanic islands and eight Formigas, and one plastic bottle—one of the only signs of human existence in sight.

This is the Azores archipelago on the edge of the North Atlantic Gyre’s circling currents. This is where, at 7,713 feet in elevation, Mount Pico reaches for the sky, claiming the highest point in Portugal. It’s where some of the tallest mountains in the world live, grounding themselves at the very bottom of the ocean.

After nine days at sea, environmental toxicologist Stephanie Wright found herself watching that one plastic bottle bob in tandem with the gentle ebb and flow of the water. It was silent, but it had a story to tell and still does—a story that relates to everything from microscopic microbes to elephants and tigers to the delight in the face of a child as they dig for a Super Mario toy at the bottom of a smiling McDonald’s Happy Meal box, and even to the very clothes on your back. And to you, right down to the blood cells coursing through your veins.

Although seemingly alien and isolated, carried astray from others of its kind, Wright knew that plastic bottle was surrounded by a family—likely multiple families—of plastics, different in size, shape, color, composition, and planned purpose but united by a fundamental commonality: synthetic polymer-based particles on a path to a destructive end.

Invisible from where she stood, these particles lingered just below the water’s surface on which the bottle floated, and many more rested 20,000 feet down to the seafloor and base of Mount Pico. Also invisible to her, these particles lingered in the air at the summit of Mount Pico, and in the air rushing into her lungs as she breathed in the contrasting organic beauty she could see.

In many ways, this book is a biography of that plastic bottle: what it’s made of, how it differs from other plastics, why it ended up where it did, where it might be headed, who and what it affects, and when a millisecond of genius insight might lead to a complete reinvention of itself and its kin.