When it comes to the federal government’s role in safeguarding the planet and its most valuable natural resources, the United States is about to perilously stumble headfirst into the great unknown. Domestic doom and gloom aside, this certainly doesn’t mean that some of the world’s largest and most powerful companies aren’t continuing to strive toward a better — and cleaner — future. Earlier this week at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in the chichi Swiss ski resort of Davos, a 30-page report on plastic packaging waste with some rather sobering key findings was released to the public. Titled “The New Plastics Economy: Rethinking the Future of Plastics,” the report finds that most (95 percent) potentially reusable and recyclable plastic packaging material, worth $80 billion to $120 billion annually, is only used once before being discarded and lost to the economy. A staggering amount of this cast-off plastic packaging, about 8 million metric tons per year, eventually winds up in the world’s oceans. Per the report, that’s roughly a garbage truckload full per minute. And if we continue on this current track, by the year 2050, the oceans will be home to more plastic waste, by weight, than fish. Can you image ... more discarded plastic junk in the ocean than there there is fish? The good news? As revealed at Davos, 40 "industry leaders" — industry leaders responsible for producing plastic shampoo bottles, mayonnaise jars, and 2-liter jugs of diet soda that could potentially outweigh the world's marine life within a matter of only a few decades — have come together to reverse this troubling trend and embrace a global circular economy in which “plastics never become waste.” Published in collaboration between the WEF and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a British charity founded in 2009 by the record-breaking yachtswoman-turned-circular economy-promoting philanthropist, with support from the McKinsey Center for Business and Environment, the report describes itself as the first comprehensive vision for a plastic waste-free future.   Bringing together the world’s top purveyors of plastic packaging materials (those aforementioned soda bottles and mayonnaise jars) to endorse the report and subsequently work toward the common goal of keeping plastic packaging out of oceans and re-circulating well after its initial use will prove to be nothing but beneficial. As noted in the report, 20 percent of plastic packaging could be “profitably reused” while another 50 percent could be recycled. It’s up to global business leaders to figure out, via innovative (re)design solutions, how to tackle that remaining 30 percent of waste, equivalent to 10 billion garbage bags, that will inevitably wind up in landfills and incinerators. Currently, only 14 percent of plastic packaging waste is reused or recycled. Reads the report’s executive summary: The overarching vision of the New Plastics Economy is that plastics never become waste; rather, they re-enter the economy as valuable technical or biological nutrients. The New Plastics Economy is underpinned by and aligns with principles of the circular economy. Its ambition is to deliver better system-wide economic and environmental outcomes by creating an effective after-use plastics economy, drastically reducing the leakage of plastics into natural systems (in particular the ocean) and other negative externalities; and decoupling from fossil feedstocks.