For decades, single-use plastic has reigned supreme, an omnipresent emblem of our throwaway culture. It cradles our takeout noodles, our online shopping, and the planet, in a suffocating embrace. By the time you finish reading this, over a million plastic bottles will have been sold worldwide. Most of them will live longer than us, by centuries.

The statistics are as grim as they are familiar. Globally, we produce over 400 million metric tons of plastic waste annually, and only 9% of it is recycled. The rest? It drifts through oceans, infiltrates soil, and splinters into microplastics, those insidious, near-invisible invaders found everywhere from Antarctic snow to human placentas. The damage to marine life is well-documented, but recently, scientists discovered microplastics in our bloodstream. The question is no longer if plastic pollution is a crisis. The question is, how do we dismantle something we built to last forever?

Governments have begun to take notice. More than 70 countries have banned or restricted single-use plastics, yet enforcement remains a challenge. In the U.S., bans vary wildly from city to city, while India, a country that pledged to phase out single-use plastic, still battles a thriving black market for the stuff.

Individuals bring more hope, leading micro-revolutions in their daily lives. The “zero waste” movement, once an esoteric pursuit, is now inching toward the mainstream. Refill stations are cropping up in grocery stores, stainless steel water bottles and beeswax wraps are replacing their plastic counterparts. A growing cadre of consumers is demanding accountability, armed with social media’s power to expose greenwashing in real time.

And then there are the businesses, some out of necessity, some out of conviction, charting a different course. Startups are engineering seaweed-based packaging that dissolves in water. Edible cutlery companies are transforming spoons into snacks. Even heavyweights like Unilever and Coca-Cola, albeit under pressure, are trialing refill-and-return schemes. A once unthinkable shift is underway. The very companies that flooded the world with plastic are now being forced to consider how to clean it up.

The road ahead requires more than well-meaning bans and reusable grocery bags. It demands innovation, political will, and an overhaul of the linear economy that churns out plastic faster than we can curb it. But here’s the hopeful twist: We’re no longer simply lamenting plastic’s omnipresence, we’re actively reimagining a world without it.