Meet the woman forcing companies to cut their plastic production

The Ocean Conservancy’s Anja Brandon is helping legislation such as California’s Plastic Pollution Prevention and Packaging Producer Responsibility Act become law.

When Anja Brandon was a PhD student at Stanford in the mid-to-late 2010s, her research focused on creating new ways to use biology to break down plastic waste. But then she had a terrifying epiphany: The scale of the challenge is so huge that technology alone wouldn’t be enough to address it. After all, 11 million tons of plastic trash end up in the ocean each year, and that figure could swell to 30 million tons by 2040. Brandon decided to go into policy, instead, in an effort to make systemic change.

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