Earlier this month, the report from the Pew Charitable Trust and its partners predicted that plastic pollution will more than double over the next 15 years.

That's the equivalent of dumping nearly a garbage truck full of plastic waste every second.

In the middle of America, hundreds of miles from an ocean, Cassidy Arena of PBS, Nebraska,

visited an innovative company that wants

to turn plastic pollution into something constructive.

When people walk into this crowded warehouse in Omaha, Nebraska, the first thing they'll

see are bags of what looks like garbage piled floor to ceiling.

But first star CEO, Patrick Leahy Leahy explains this is not trash.

It's his company's treasure.

What makes First Star recycling unique is then we take hard to recycle plastics. We take

those, re-recycle them in-house. We don't ship them out to another place and we make plastic

lumber or pellets with it.

Leahy's company has long been a leader in plastic waste management in Nebraska, and it's now

trying out a new type of recycling, taking plastics cold from oceans around the world and turning

them into building materials.

Leahy says his company is one of the few in the U.S. that processes trash considered too hard to recycle,

things like gum wrappers, plastic silverware, and grocery bags.

Four thousand miles across the Pacific, word of Leahy's innovative business impressed the Center for Marine Debray Research, or CMDR, at Hawaii Pacific University in Honolulu.

It specializes in cleaning the oceans of plastics, including discarded fishing gear.

Every year, they collect nearly 200 tons of it. And the trash is not just

from the waters off Hawaii. It comes from all corners of the globe, including a debris field

known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, located roughly midway between Hawaii and California.

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