Marine plastic pollution is a symptom of an inherently wasteful linear plastic economy, costing us more than US$ 2.2 trillion per year. Of the 6.3 billion tonnes of fossil fuel-derived plastic (FFP) waste produced to date, only 9% has been recycled; the rest being incinerated (12%) or dumped into the environment (79%). FFPs take centuries to degrade, meaning five billion tonnes of increasingly fragmented and dangerous plastics have accumulated in our oceans, soil and air. Rates of FFP production and waste are growing rapidly, driven by increased demand and shifting strategies of oil and gas companies responding to slowing profit growth. Without effective recycling, the harm caused by FFP waste will keep increasing, jeopardizing first marine life and ultimately humankind. In this Perspective article, we review the global costs of plastic pollution and explain why solving this is imperative for humanity's well-being. We show that FFP pollution is far beyond a marine environmental issue: it now invades our bodies, causing disease and dysfunction, while millions of adults and children work in conditions akin to slavery, picking through our waste. We argue that an integrated economic and technical solution, catalyzed through a voluntary industry-led contribution from new FFP production, is central to arrest plastic waste flows by making used plastic a cashable commodity, incentivizing recovery and accelerating industrialization of polymerto-polymer technologies. Without much-needed systematic transformation, driven by a contribution from FFP production, humanity and the oceans face a troubling future.

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Forensic odontology frequently plays a significant role in identification of the victims of multi-fatality disasters, but not in all. It depends on adequate dental remains surviving the disaster and on the availability of dental records to be successful. This paper describes current practice in the techniques of identification in forensic odontology and outlines recent advances that are moving into the mainstream. KEY POINTSForensic odontology plays a key role in mass disaster victim identification (DVI) when good-quality antemortem (AM) dental records are available. Images including radiographs, computerized tomography (CT) data and three-dimensional (3D) scan data are considered more reliable AM records than written dental charts and odontograms. Interpretation, transcription and comparison of dental datasets are complex processes that should be undertaken only by trained dental professionals. The future of forensic odontology DVI techniques is likely to include the use of 3D datasets for comparison.

Forensic odontology is the application of dental expertise to legal issues. Commonly, it involves the comparison of dental records of a missing person with a deceased individual for the purposes of forensic personal identification, either in a single case, or as part of the response to an event involving multiple simultaneous fatalities (Disaster Victim Identification, or DVI). It may also involve studies to determine the age of an individual, which may be required as part of a forensic identification process, or for another legal purpose such as the determination of legal responsibility, or in connection with immigration. This report examines the types of radiological information currently used in such forensic studies, and discusses how this information may be accessed or recorded, as well as the techniques that are commonly applied to the radiological data to reach a satisfactory outcome for application in forensic casework.Keywords: Dental radiology, forensic, forensic odontology, forensic radiology, radiology.