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Company Spins Beach Plastic Into Dish Soap Bottles

Plastic litters a beach on Laysan Island in the Hawaiian Islands National Wildlife Refuge.

Proctor and Gamble Co. plans to create a limited run of dish soap bottles that use 10 percent recycled ocean plastics to help shine a spotlight on the growing problem of plastic waste clogging the world's oceans.

The remaining 90 percent would be made with other recycled plastics.

The company launched a campaign to make 320,000 bottles for its "Fairy Ocean Plastic Bottle," which would be sold in UK stores next year.

The company is working with Terracycle, a recycling firm that has focused on collecting beach plastics.

A company representative told industry magazine PlasticsToday that at least a quarter of the beach plastic going into the bottles is collected from the local market in western Europe, with the rest coming from pollution hot spots around the world.

The United Nations estimates that the equivalent of one garbage truck of plastic waste dumps into the world's oceans every minute.

The United Nations says plastic waste in oceans costs at least $8 billion in damage to marine ecosystems, and up to 80 per cent of all marine litter is made of plastic.

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