With the understanding that more persistent materials pose greater potential threats to ecosystems and human health, environmental persistence is a fundamental principle of regulatory frameworks. Therefore, considering persistence during product design by selecting materials that quickly break down when leaked into the environment presents an opportunity to minimize risks to ecosystems and human health. Recently collected data on environmentally realistic plastic degradation rates catalyze this thinking. Here, we aggregate concepts learned from the past decades of plastic pollution research and integrate them into established material selection practices, formulating a novel eco-design framework for minimizing the environmental impacts of plastic pollution.