Reshaping it may be an answer for plastic waste

It’s bad enough that the world stacks, dumps and burns mountains of gallon milk jugs, water bottles, package wrappers and take-out food containers every day. But after we finish our last bites, many of those plastic bits make it into the oceans, where they break down into small, fish-food-size pieces — enough to choke a seahorse.

And without even a side of salsa to season the plastic chips.

Technology has figured out how to put a computer on our wrists, store thousands of photographs in a smartphone and create software that can answer complex questions — though not always correctly. But it has...