Sustainability and the circular economy have become cornerstones of corporate strategy. Today's products must satisfy the needs of engineering, marketing, business, regulation, and consumer preference while also being sustainable. Design decisions rely on eco-design and green chemistry principles, life cycle assessments (LCA), and related methods to reduce a product's environmental impact. Plastics and their pollution challenge current approaches in the design of sustainable products. Materials are selected principally by balancing tradeoffs between environmental impact categories, such as greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and water usage during production. However, environmental persistence, defined as the time a plastic item lasts in the environment as pollution, is missing from the selection criteria (e.g., in LCA ).