A Powerade bottle from 2001 was found on Yaya, a Peruvian beach south of Lima. A Coca-Cola bottle from 2002 was found on Robinson Crusoe Island, a World Biosphere Reserve, in Chile. These were the oldest of all the bottles collected.
These discarded pieces of packaging were collected in a new macro-study that looked at the origin of plastic bottle pollution on beaches and cities along Latin America’s Pacific coastline. The research—the first to be conducted on a regional scale, thanks to a citizen science initiative covering 10 countries—combed more than 12,000 kilometers of coastline along the west coast of South and Central America. It found that across the region,