We're only just beginning to realise how serious long-term exposure to microscopic plastic particles is likely to be for our health. While plastic polluting corporations lobby for business as usual, none of us is safe from the indestructible toxic sludge that's been building in our air, water and food for the past 70 years -- not even those doing the polluting.

What's a lethal dose of plastic poisoning?

We don't know yet, but one day we will.

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Consider Marie Curie. She gave herself a lethal dose of radiation after carrying in her lab coat the very elements whose discovery bagged her a Nobel prize for physics and chemistry. Science didn't know yet that radioactive materials can curdle our genes, and possibly dispatch us with a nasty little tumour.

Mull on that while you stand in the checkout queue at Clicks, because otherwise the wait will be as dull as unbuttered toast.

'Do as I say, not as I do' -- the gospel according to Clicks just about every big corporate

My Liverpudlian mum calls these places "mals", as in the ciggie brand Pall Mall, or "mal-ware". Us Saffers call them "malls", as in maul, haul, appal.

Both seem fitting for this point of planetary inflection. A UN-directed effort to put a global treaty in place to cut plastic pollution just failed epically. Most countries wanted a strong agreement that would turn off the tap on pollution by cutting virgin plastic production and banning many of the poisonous chemicals they carry in their lab-baked DNA. But a few greedy petro-states made...