This is the first installment in "The War on Plastic,” an ongoing series that details the plastic pollution problem in New Jersey and efforts to curb it that could change the way you eat, drink and shop. Read more from the “The War on Plastic” series here.

Try to think of something in your life that doesn't involve plastics.

Chances are, you won't be able to. Plastic is everywhere, from food containers to your smart phone to the plumbing in your home.

A pliable, inexpensive product, it has made modern life easier across the globe. But that convenience comes at a price.

Plastic litter inundates New Jersey from the Delaware River on its western border, to the Atlantic Ocean on its eastern shore. Rivers and bays carry millions of pulverized pieces so small they enter the food and water supply — and even your body.

It litters beaches, kills wildlife and threatens human health.

“We have become a throwaway culture,” said Serpil Guran, a Rutgers professor and expert in waste management. “We have become used to using something once and then discarding it. And now we are paying for it.”

New Jersey has taken the first steps toward enacting the strongest ban on plastics in the nation — a move that would address a global problem with very local consequences.

Under the proposed bill, grocery store bags, straws and foam cups, carryout containers, food trays and egg cartons — all made of plastic — could be a thing of the past in New Jersey.

But as ambitious as the measure is, it still tackles only a portion of New Jersey's plastic problem. Plastic bottles, lids, cigarette butts, candy wrappers, foam packaging and dozens of other everyday plastics still make up the bulk of what's found on beaches and river fronts.

The measure, which would also put a 10-cent fee on paper bags, still needs to pass a number of legislative hurdles and its sponsors don't expect a vote until next year. But it has gotten the attention of the entire plastics industry, which has turned out in force to oppose the bill at two recent legislative hearings.

Lobbyists and business executives argue that the bill would hurt mom-and-pop businesses like small grocery stores and restaurants, which would have to find more expensive alternatives.

And they say it is not a plastic problem, but a littering problem. And it could be solved with better recycling.

“New Jersey would be the first state in the nation to do something this drastic,” said Matt Seaholm, executive director of the American Progressive Bag Alliance, which has fought against bans in California, New York and other places across the country. “That’s why we’re saying this is not the right approach.”

But supporters of the ban say the days are numbered for single-use plastics — products designed to be used once and discarded.

Momentum has been growing nationally and locally.

California and Hawaii have instituted statewide plastic bag bans in recent years. New York City’s ban on plastic foam food trays and packing peanuts, often referred to as Styrofoam, goes into effect on Jan. 1. And more than a dozen New Jersey towns have passed ordinances regulating plastic sales, many within the past year.

In August, Gov. Phil Murphy vetoed a bill that would have placed a 5-cent fee on plastic grocery store bags, saying New Jersey needs a “more robust and comprehensive method” to reduce plastics pollution.

That move signaled to lawmakers, environmentalists and the plastics industry that he would support a bill by one of his political allies, state Sen. Bob Smith, D-Middlesex, to enact the most comprehensive plastic ban ever taken by a state.

Smith said it will force New Jerseyans to change a lifestyle that has for decades relied on inexpensive conveniences like the 4.5 billion grocery store bags given out every year in the Garden State.

“Do you want to go to a beach that’s a garbage can?" Smith said at a recent hearing. "Or do you want to go to a beach that’s clean?"

Since 2015, the advocacy group NY/NJ Baykeeper has been fishing for plastics throughout the region’s urban waterways from Sandy Hook to the Tappan Zee Bridge on the Hudson River.

They’re not hard to find. Most of the plastic ever made still exists.

Plastics take decades or centuries to decompose. The plastic that finds its way into New Jersey’s waters just breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces until they’re invisible to the naked eye.

“Put your feet in the sand and odds are you’re touching a piece of plastic,” said Mike Castellano, as he led a group of volunteers with Surfrider Foundation as they picked up trash on a Sea Bright beach in August. “It’s really the little pieces that we find most of all. They’re everywhere.”

A report published by Baykeeper in 2016 estimated that there were almost 166 million pieces of plastic floating in the NY-NJ Harbor Estuary, ranging from bits of foam food boxes to microscopic beads from beauty products that can't be filtered in wastewater or drinking water plants.

More than 85 percent were microplastics — particles smaller than a grain of sand. More and more scientists are discovering microplastics in the food we eat and the water we drink.

The Baykeeper report was the first of its kind in New Jersey. But it came as no surprise to those who live along its waterways.

Plastics have accounted for 74 percent of the trash picked up during New Jersey’s largest beach cleanups by Clean Ocean Action since 2010 with a record 84 percent last year.

Anytime the wind is blowing out to sea, New Jersey fisherman expect to haul in what they derisively call “bag fish.”

“It’s not uncommon for us to find a hundred bags in a 300-foot net,” said Brick Wenzel, an Ocean County commercial fisherman. “It’s a problem for us, not the least of which is slipping on them while we’re working on deck.”

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New Jersey wildlife is often hit hard. Nearly every osprey nest surveyed by scientists and volunteers along the Shore this year had multiple pieces of plastic in it. And four birds from different nests were found dead in recent months after being tangled in plastic fishing line, according to the Conserve Wildlife Foundation of New Jersey.

Rivers are inundated with plastic, even in some of their most pristine stretches.

On the upper Passaic River, a team of Rutgers scientists found plastic concentrations of more than 3 million particles per square kilometer in communities like Fairfield, Chatham and Livingston — far from the tidal surges that flush the lower, more polluted parts of the river. They also found 300 compounds from flavoring agents to pharmaceuticals attached to the microplastics in both the Passaic and Raritan rivers — a potential health threat if ingested.

On the Hudson River, more than 2,000 volunteers with Riverkeeper picked up 38 tons of plastic trash from Manhattan to Poughkeepsie in one day this year. The most prevalent were cigarette butts made of cellulose acetate — a form of plastic, followed by foam pieces and bottles.

On the banks of the lower Passaic River in towns like Clifton, Nutley and Belleville, single-use plastic packaging, bottles and food containers were the most prevalent trash found in a soon-to-be-released report by a team from Montclair State University.

On the upper reaches of the Raritan River, an advocacy group recently found high concentrations of degraded pieces of bags, wraps and other microplastics downriver of some sewage treatment discharge pipes in parts of Somerset and Hunterdon counties.

On the banks of streams and rivers that meander through the South Jersey Pinelands reserve, illegal dumping of cars and debris has long been a problem. But plastic litter is becoming more prevalent along its waterways, according to the Pinelands Preservaton Alliance.

On a recent morning, a three-person crew boarded the Baykeeper's small boat looking for microscopic pieces of plastic in Raritan Bay.

The crew threw into the water a net so fine it could capture a grain of sand. After 15 minutes and a short distance from their dock in Keyport, they pulled out speckles of unidentified blue and red plastic fragments.

“These pieces may have been in the bay for years, decades,” said Meredith Comi, Baykeeper’s restoration director. “They never go away. They only become smaller."

Recycling plastic is not easy in New Jersey — or really anywhere in the United States.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that just 9.1 percent of the 34.5 million tons of plastics generated in the U.S. in 2015 was recycled.

New Jerseyans recycled 156,000 tons of plastic in 2016 — most of it food and beverage containers — a leap from 50,000 tons in 2000. But it’s still a small portion of the estimated one million tons of plastic waste generated annually in New Jersey.

“If we were properly disposing and recycling and we had been doing this all along, we would all be enjoying a day at the beach instead of being here,” said Sal Risalvato, representing 1,500 service stations and convenience stores that oppose the ban.

But there are plenty of problems with recycling plastic.

Of the seven types of common plastic, only two are universally collected curbside in New Jersey. This includes most food, beverage and cleaning containers, but excludes many other products.

Telling plastic apart can be difficult, which is a problem because plastics can’t be mixed when repurposed into new products.

So your soda bottle (plastic No. 1) is fine for recycling. But the cap on that soda bottle (plastic No. 5) is not.

Your clear milk jug (plastic No. 2) is fine. Your clear takeout container for salad (plastic No. 6) is not.

“It is unbelievably confusing to the general public and creates problems for the recycler,” said Wayne DeFeo, a New Jersey environmental and recycling consultant. “We always tell people, ‘When in doubt, throw out.’”

Plastics are thus either placed in trash to be landfilled or find their way onto beaches, riverbanks and other places they don't belong.

"It just lingers for such a long period of time," said Jaclyn Rhoads of the Pinelands Preservation Alliance. "The only way we can get rid of it is going out there and making sure we pick as much of it up as we can."

Plastic foam can be recycled but it’s rarely done. Curbside pickup is virtually non-existent because foam is 95 percent air in a market where money is made on weight. Styrofoam takes up a lot of room and weighs next to nothing compared to a recycling truck full of metal, glass or paper.

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There are only about 20 places in New Jersey to drop off Styrofoam, but almost none will accept even clean food containers like cups and meat trays, fearing they will contaminate the end product.

A Styrofoam recycling program in Sussex County is often touted by the plastics industry as a success story. But it will not take food containers, packing peanuts, colored foam or any foam with tape or labels on it.

Plastic bags are the bane of most recycling companies. They are a costly nuisance that get snagged on conveyor belts causing shutdowns of entire plants. New Jersey recyclers support an outright ban.

But most grocery stores take back their own bags for recycling along with dry cleaning bags, bread bags, newspaper sleeves and Ziplock bags. They are shipped to specialty recyclers where they are ground up and mixed with wood flower to make decking material like some you see on Jersey Shore boardwalks.

“The best answer is not to take plastic in the first place because many of the plastic products we use are not necessary to everyday life,” said DeFeo. “Do you really need a dozen plastic bags to haul your groceries home every time you go shopping?”

New Jersey's proposed ban will not solve the state’s pollution problem.

Even if it's passed and is effective, there will still be bottles, cigarette butts, candy wrappers and dozens of other everyday plastics that will still find their way to places they shouldn’t be, including regions not known to be polluted, like the upper reaches of the Raritan River.

"This is an area where people come to see the fall foliage and go to dinner at a restaurant on the river," said Kristi McDonald, science director of Raritan Headwaters and author of the yet-to-be-released report. "Our area is supposed to be the cleanest stretch of the Raritan and we're finding these microplastics here."

But supporters say the ban is a strong start to curb society's plastic addiction. Look to California's plastic bag ban to see where New Jersey can go, they say.

When Los Angeles County adopted its plastic bag ban in 2010, bags accounted for 7.4 percent of the trash collected on the state’s beaches. By 2017 when a statewide ban was less than a year old, it was down to 3.1 percent.

Seaholm, of the plastic bag lobby, argues that the cleanup numbers are skewed because the 2010 survey represents different types of bags while the 2017 numbers reflect only grocery store bags.

Regardless, advocates say one stat is all you need. Californians used 15 billion plastic bags annually before the bans. Now they hardly use any.

“Maybe the biggest shock is how quiet it was,” said Mark Murray, executive director of the advocacy group Californians Against Waste. “Some people were anticipating this big uproar, this big backlash. It ended up being a shrug of the shoulders and people bringing their own bags.”

The plastics industry will not let New Jersey's ban move through Trenton without a battle.

Joined by coalitions that represent convenience stores, supermarkets and other businesses, the plastics industry has fought against regulation to varying degrees of success throughout the United States.

The American Progressive Bag Alliance raised $6.1 million to try to defeat California’s statewide push for a plastic bag ban. But after a few legislative twists and turns, the ban was ultimately passed by referendum in 2016.

Mark Daniels, an executive at the packaging company Novolex, said there would likely be layoffs at its paper bag plant in Elizabeth due to the bill’s proposed 10-cent fee on paper bags.

Another New Jersey company that could be hurt is Formosa Plastics USA of Livingston, which employs 400 and manufactures plastic resins, Seaholm said.

Industry leaders downplay the extent their products have in waste. Bag makers also say the term “single-use” is erroneous for their products. They claim three out of every four bags are used again often to line small trash cans or as pooper scoopers.

“The consumer will have to find an alternative,” Daniels said. “They will probably end up using a plastic bag they purchase.”

Meanwhile, some small business owners are taking the lead against plastic and not waiting for a ban.

Debbie Blissick opened Cup of Bliss Coffee Roasters in Collingswood, Camden County, this year using compostable, corn-based hot and cold coffee cups, lids and cutlery, as well as paper straws.

Blissick knew the products would be more expensive, she says, but she has never priced plastic cheaper alternatives.

"I have to limit how much garbage I can have with the municipality anyway, and I want to leave a better world for my child,’’ said Blissick, who has a 4-month-old daughter. “It’s a whole ecosystem, and as a business owner, I am not putting a disturbance in my ecosystem."

Towns getting hammered by plastics pollution are not waiting for the state to take action.

More than a dozen municipal councils, including those in Teaneck, Hoboken and Jersey City, have passed a fee or ban on plastic bags.

But the epicenter of the war on plastics is on the northern end of the Jersey Shore in tiny Monmouth Beach (pop. 3,600), which in May approved one of the most stringent bans in the nation. Businesses can no longer offer plastic bags, plastic straws or foam takeout containers.

That forced James Caverly, owner of Booskerdoo Coffee & Baking Co., to replace straws with a new drink lid for iced coffee. He said it was a seamless change and he got rid of straws at his four other locations outside Monmouth Beach.

“Customers don’t like change, but give it a month and they forget the old way they did things,” Caverly said. “It’s really not that big a deal.”

That the plastic ban movement has taken off on the Jersey Shore is a surprise to no one.

Beaches are some of the hardest hit areas with plastics due to 100 million tourists and day trippers flooding the area during the summer. Of the 373,686 pieces of garbage picked up in Clean Ocean Action’s 2017 annual beach sweep, 84 percent were plastic.

But the Shore is also the victim of North Jersey’s combined sewage outfalls where raw effluent and runoff from streets pour into rivers during heavy rainstorms. Plastic items that are sometimes flushed down a toilet, like tampon applicators and syringes, were found washing up on beaches in late July and August when the area was hit with a daily barrage of showers and thunderstorms.

The churning sea and crashing waves often pulverize plastic into smaller pieces that litter beaches.

Nowhere was this seen more than on a stretch of Sea Bright just south of Sandy Hook, where one late August morning dozens of volunteers with the Surfrider Foundation picked up 220 pounds of garbage, including 1,052 plastic fragments and 471 pieces of plastic foam — more than half of which were smaller than a quarter.

“Bottles are a problem but they’re easy to find and pick up,” Castellano said. “It’s the small pieces. We’ll get to a lot of them but not even close to how much is still left out here.”

Staff Writer Tammy Paolino contributed to this story.