The big picture: Plastics demand is projected to only increase — and the footprint of plastic pollution with it.

• Plastics made from oil and natural gas are an integral part of our daily lives, from cell phones to shipping materials to lifesaving medical devices.
• But we use many plastics only once — and promptly discard them.

Driving the news: This week, Canada announced it plans to ban single-use plastics — likely bags, straws, plates, etc. — by 2021.

• Canada's move is part of a broader trend at various levels of government to restrict or ban certain types of plastics.
• And there's a growing "zero waste" movement on social media.

Microplastics — bits of plastic less than 5 millimeters in length — have been found lurking in the deep waters off California, on otherwise pristine mountain peaks in the Alps and in the gastrointestinal tracts of sea creatures large and small.

• It’s quite possible that, as a legacy of our consumer habits, each of us is consuming microplastics on a regular basis as well.
• What's not yet known is whether it's taking a toll on our health.

What's happening: There are calls to ban single-use plastics and force companies to rely less on petrochemicals. That industry is taking notice, trying to stay ahead of consumer backlash by focusing on recycling.

Details: Roland Geyer, the lead author of a comprehensive 2017 study on plastic production and end use, estimates that about 9,200 million metric tons of virgin plastics have been produced since 1950.

• Geyer's study projected that by 2050 about 12,000 million metric tons of plastic waste could be in landfills or the natural environment.
• Globally, less than 20% of plastics were recycled in 2015. In the U.S., it's worse. Just 9% of plastics were recycled that year, according to the most recent data from the Environmental Protection Agency.
• In 2018, China banned most plastics headed for its recycling processors, shutting down the U.S.'s largest recycling export market and compounding our waste problem.

Since most plastics come from fossil fuels, our plastics dependency is also exacerbating climate change.

• A recent report from an environmental group found that by 2030, plastics-related emissions could reach 1.34 gigatons per year — equivalent to the emissions released by more than 295 new 500-megawatt coal-fired power plants.

Unlike with other global environmental problems, consumers have more control over how this story plays out in the future.

• Efforts to replace plastic straws and switch from single-use plastic water bottles to reusable containers can make a difference when it comes to marine pollution, says Kyle Van Houtan, chief scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Go deeper: Read the full Axios deep dive

• Big Oil doubles down on recycling
• The partisan recycling gap
• What scientists are doing to try to create plastic alternatives
• The troubling places plastics have been found
• Parents against plastic
• The art of ocean trash

Earlier this year, we saw the unprecedented disappearance of sea ice from the Bering Sea during a time of year when it should be gaining ice. This trend toward plummeting sea ice in the Alaskan and Canadian Arctic continues, this time centered in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas.

Why it matters: Sea ice loss is disrupting the balance of heat in the Northern Hemisphere, and it is reverberating throughout ecosystems, causing everything from plankton blooms near the Arctic Ocean surface to mass haul-outs of walruses in Russia and Alaska. It may also be disrupting weather patterns across the Northern Hemisphere.

The big picture: Across the entire Arctic, sea ice extent is at a record low for this point in the year, and depending on weather conditions during the summer, it's possible that 2019 could set a new record low ice extent.

• The all-time record low sea ice extent was set in 2012, although subsequent years have nearly beaten that mark.
• So far, weather conditions have favored an early start to the Greenland ice melt season, too, and ice melt there, unlike disappearing sea ice, contributes to global sea level rise.
• The portion of Greenland experiencing melting ice hit a record high for the date on June 13, with temperatures rising to near freezing at Summit Station, in the center of the ice sheet.
• The Arctic is warming at more than twice the rate of the rest of the world.

What they're saying:

• "At the moment, you can essentially sail uninterrupted from the North Pacific to the Canadian Arctic," says Zack Labe, a climate scientist and Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Irvine.
• "The Arctic is a regulator of Northern Hemisphere climate, and while the ice that is melting now isn't going to affect whether you get a thunderstorm tomorrow, in the long term, these are going to have profound effects on your weather and climate down the road that you will have to take action on, like it or not," says Rick Thoman of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.

Go deeper: New U.S. Arctic strategy omits climate change, takes aim at China, Russia

But, but, but: The international spread of Ebola was expected by health experts given the proximity of the outbreak areas in the DRC to the heavily trafficked border with Uganda.

• Health authorities in Uganda had been vaccinating health workers in anticipation of seeing cases.
• The overall trajectory of the outbreak remains unchanged, as health workers have been unable to break through community distrust and a violent insurgency inside the DRC.
• The high percentage of cases that are community cases, ones in which health workers were not aware of infected people or the individuals they have come in contact with, is especially concerning.

Details: This Ebola outbreak is already the second largest on record, and even the deployment of a successful vaccine has proven insufficient at arresting its spread. A key reason for this is the challenging security environment in which responders are operating.

• Health workers have been attacked and killed, and levels of community mistrust remain high in affected areas.
• “Insecurity and community mistrust are a huge barrier, and we don’t have ready-made answers for dealing with either of those,” says Stephen Morrison, director of the Global Health Policy Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Health workers in the DRC and Uganda are conducting ring vaccination campaigns using a vaccine supplied by Merck known as the rVSV-ZEBOV vaccine.

• But the vaccine is not sufficient for preventing all new cases and fatalities with so many community cases.
• “The vaccine is not a silver bullet for this outbreak,” says Morrison.

The impact: Given the continued increase in cases in the DRC and the potential for additional spread into neighboring countries, health officials have expressed concern that the vaccine supply may run out in the next few months.

• In May, a WHO advisory group recommended that the DRC offer lower doses of vaccines and to consider using other experimental vaccines to stretch supplies.

What we’re watching: Unlike the 2014–2016 West Africa epidemic, this one has skirted below the radar of world leaders. The appointment of a high-level UN coordinator with extensive security experience has raised hopes of a more robust response.

• So far, the WHO has taken the lead in responding, sending hundreds of personnel to the region.
• The CDC has just 15 experts in the DRC, but the security situation has kept them confined to cities away from the outbreak zones, an agency spokesman tells Axios.
• Morrison and Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, say the U.S. and other nations need to reassess their contributions to stopping this outbreak.

The bottom line: On its present course, Morrison thinks the outbreak could persist for another 1–2 years. The longer it lasts, the greater the chance it has to reach major population centers.

Go deeper: Axios' complete Ebola outbreak coverage