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In 2019, I stood in a bar in Atlanta, Georgia, surrounded by hundreds of other people adorned in red, blue, and white. It was the semifinals of the Women’s World Cup, and the United States was playing against England. The U.S. women were looking to go on to the final, but this would be no easy feat.

The game moved back and forth: The U.S. scored in the first 10 minutes of the match, and the English scored about 10 minutes later. Then, 31 minutes in, the U.S. captain, Alex Morgan, cut across an English defender and headed in the game-winning goal. She celebrated by pretending to sip a cup of tea. The Atlanta bar went wild, perhaps just as much for the trolling celebration as for the goal. A friend of mine, who spends far more of his time watching the NFL and NBA than women’s soccer, turned to me and said, “This is the most fun I’ve ever had watching sports in my life!”

The U.S. would go on to defeat the Netherlands in the final to win its fourth World Cup. But the 2019 tournament was also a special turning point for women’s soccer in America. It’s clear, looking back, that the emotional investment of so many American fans was tied not only to the team’s accomplishments on the field, but also to the national and sporting politics of the moment. For many, Megan Rapinoe, the star of that World Cup who continuously spoke out against homophobia, racism, and sexism, became a symbolic counterweight to the Trump administration. Watching the top women’s soccer player in the world (Rapinoe would officially win the Best FIFA Women’s Player award a few months later) adorned in the colors and crest of the United States provided many fans with a sense of pride in their country after years of political tumult. The success of the women’s team also coincided with their legal fight to be paid equally to the men’s team. Throughout the tournament, many people got the sense that cheering for the national team also meant rooting for the effort to close the gap between men and women in other areas of American life.

[Read: The Women’s World Cup is about more than soccer]

If the 2019 women’s team represented a soccer culture in flux, this year’s squad speaks to something else: how the women’s game in the United States has never been more stable than it is today.

Rapinoe, now 38 and playing in her fourth World Cup, has announced that this will be her last tournament and that she will retire from professional soccer at the end of her domestic season. Rapinoe is the squad’s oldest player, and her journey has been long. After she left the University of Portland, she decided to go professional in 2009. She became the second overall pick of the inaugural Women’s Professional Soccer league at a time when the average salary of a professional women’s player in the U.S. was roughly $25,000. Just a year later, her team folded, and only two years after that, the entire league suspended operations. Rapinoe then played in Australia and France, and even in an amateur league, before joining the newly formed National Women’s Soccer League in the U.S. in 2013. She has played for OL Reign (formerly the Seattle Reign FC) ever since.

Now consider Rapinoe’s teammate, Alyssa Thompson. She is 18 years old, currently in her first season in the NWSL, and, as of Friday’s 3–0 win against Vietnam, the second-youngest player ever to represent the country in a World Cup.

The gap between the experience of the youngest and oldest members of the team tells the story of women’s soccer in the United States. The NWSL is now in its 11th season. The league and the players have their first-ever collective-bargaining agreement, which includes an increase in player salaries, free housing, health insurance, 401(k)s, and formal parental leave. (The new agreement also put in place new protocols for player safety, something that took on an additional, urgent importance following a 2022 report that found that emotional abuse and sexual misconduct were a systemic issue in the league.) More than 1 million fans attended NWSL matches last season. And this season, the average attendance on the opening night beat the league’s previous attendance record by nearly 50 percent.

Thompson’s team, Angel City FC, based in Los Angeles, represents an unprecedented level of success and optimism for women’s professional soccer. The team is owned by a conglomerate of high-profile celebrities including Natalie Portman, America Ferrera, Eva Longoria, and Serena Williams, as well as former soccer greats such as Mia Hamm, Abby Wambach, Julie Foudy, and Shannon Boxx. Their games have been attended by Hollywood stars and have an average home attendance of nearly 20,000 people a game this season, which is higher than the average of more than a dozen Major League Soccer men’s teams. HBO produced a three-part documentary about the team this past May. As of last year, the team reportedly has a valuation of $100 million, twice as much as any other team in the league.

Though she is just in her first professional season, Thompson is quickly becoming the face of the franchise. Michael Holzer has been the private coach of Thompson and her sister Gisele (a year younger and a member of the U.S. Women’s Youth National Team) for the past two and a half years. He told me that Thompson was born with a natural gift for soccer but has also competed against boys and older women since she was about 13 years old. Of both sisters, he said, “I would often put them with adult college players or adult pro players to really test and challenge them.” Holzer also said that many of his sessions with the sisters would begin at 5:30 a.m., before school started, and that the two have pushed each other to a higher level. “They’re so disciplined. That’s what separates them, beyond their talent,” he said. He added something else that differentiates Thompson: “She is also incredibly fast.” (Even that might be an understatement. Thompson ran the 100-meter dash her junior year of high school in 11.69 seconds, one of the fastest times in the state, despite making track practice only periodically because of soccer.)

Thompson hadn’t originally intended to go pro this early. She had committed to Stanford, a longtime powerhouse in women’s soccer that has served as an incubator for future national-team players. But Holzer said that plans changed for Thompson following her national-team debut last year. In October 2022, when she was still in her senior year of high school, she made her first appearance for the U.S. Women’s National Team (USWNT), subbing in for the player she had long admired, Rapinoe. “I think that experience showed her and her family that she’s ready,” Holzer told me. Angel City thought she was ready too, and spent nearly half a million dollars to ensure their selection of Thompson as the first overall pick in the 2023 NWSL draft this January.

Thompson has already shown why Angel City made such a big bet on her. Eleven minutes into her NWSL debut this past March, she received a pass from her teammate on the left side of the field, dropped her shoulder, let the ball run across the front of her body, and fired a shot from about 20 yards out into the top right-hand corner of the net. She became the second-youngest player in the league to score in a debut, and the fourth youngest to score any NWSL goal. She was still two months away from her high-school graduation. A couple of months later, she became the first teenager to make a USWNT roster since 1995.

Still, it is difficult to overstate the amount of groundwork that has been laid for players like Thompson by the athletes who came before them. When Thompson was growing up, many women who played professional soccer had to take on other jobs, most teams struggled to have even a few thousand people show up to games, and little protected the players from exploitation and abuse. The NWSL is still growing, and more can be done to support its athletes, but the landscape of U.S. women’s soccer today is radically different from Rapinoe’s early days. Thompson is acutely aware of this. “I feel like I was born at the right time, because the women’s game is growing so much right now,” she said in a Players’ Tribune interview alongside her Angel City teammate Christen Press, a veteran of the USWNT and winner of two World Cups. Referring to Press, she said, “All the players like you and past national-team players made it to where it is now, and it’s honestly amazing, because this would not be an option” before. In particular, she talked about her amazement at substituting for Rapinoe in her debut: “I could not stop thinking about going in, like, I can’t believe I’m here.”

Thompson isn’t the only one here—a whole new generation of young women are at this year’s World Cup. There’s 21-year-old Trinity Rodman, who has reportedly signed the most lucrative contract in NWSL history, and there’s 22-year-old Sophia Smith, the reigning U.S. Women’s Player of the Year, who scored twice in the opening game against Vietnam. These women, and others, represent the present and future of the U.S. national team. It is a legacy they intend to protect.

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In 2023, the options for a build-your-own fast-casual lunch can include wild Alaskan salmon, harissa honey chicken, cauliflower shawarma, seasonal roasted zucchini, preserved lemon vinaigrette, za’atar bread crumbs, creamy vegan feta, and skhug. But whatever you choose, it will all inevitably be served in a compostable bowl. As an office worker blessed (and cursed) with endless overpriced meal options, I have shoveled way too much random food into my mouth from a compostable vessel, using a compostable utensil.

The forks, in particular, are not prone to subtlety: Some are embossed with the word COMPOSTABLE; others are green, in case anyone forgets they are “green.” But the compostable-packaging takeover has been tough to miss. Perhaps you have gotten leftovers in a compostable container, stuffed groceries into a compostable produce bag, or sipped coffee out of a compostable straw. Compostable packaging “is growing, and growing a lot,” David Henkes, a food-industry analyst at Technomic, told me. By 2021, 7 percent of all food-service packaging was compostable, Henkes said; its share has almost certainly grown since then, especially in major cities. Among the companies that now use it: Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, Cava, Sweetgreen, Panera Bread, Taco Bell, and Frito-Lay.

But although compostable packaging is easy to spot, compost bins to put it in are not. All of my office forks and soggy fiber packaging have gone straight into the kitchen trash, just like normal plastic would. Only a tiny fraction of this compostable packaging and plastic, it turns out, is actually getting composted. Even if restaurants, homes, and office buildings have composting bins, in most places this pile of compostable trash has nowhere to go: America doesn’t have the composting infrastructure to deal with it. These products might have the potential to be better for the planet than traditional plastic, but right now, compostable plastic is just plastic.

What makes plastic so great is also what makes it so terrible. The substance, created from fossil fuels, is cheap, moldable, and so durable that most plastic that humans have ever produced still exists. Compostable plastic is made by chemically manipulating plant sugars such as corn starch and sugar cane to achieve similar properties; the flimsier, cardboardlike compostable bowls are molded out of bamboo and other plant fibers. The promise of these products is the same: Whereas a plastic fork or bowl might get used for just a few minutes before lingering in the environment forever, a compostable version degrades over time, not unlike an apple core you throw away in the woods. Only more slowly. Much more slowly.

In most cases, compostable plastic is compostable only under very specific conditions. “It’s not like what you would do in your yard if you tried to compost a banana peel,” Sarah-Jeanne Royer, an oceanographer at Hawaii Pacific University, told me. “You need to have access to a composting facility.” And a home compost pile is like the industrial version in the same way that a pickup-basketball game among preteens is the same sport as the NBA. Fruit and vegetables start to dissolve into soil within a few weeks; meat takes a little longer. Eventually, any form of compostable plastic should break down too, Frederick Michel Jr., a compost expert at Ohio State University, told me. Eventually. In one study, compostable plastic bags buried in soil for three years were so sturdy they could still hold a full load of groceries. Royer submerged a type of compostable plastic in seawater and could not find any signs of degradation 428 days later.

A commercial plant speeds that timeline up to just a few months, using machinery that encourages the best possible conditions for composting. The bugs and microbes that break down organic matter release heat in the process, and all the rotting waste at a composting facility can routinely hit temperatures of 160 degrees. You will never achieve that at home.

But good luck finding one of those facilities. America is churning out all of this biodegradable packaging without the ability to process it: The entire country has roughly 200 full-scale food-waste composting plants, and about three-fifths of those accept compostable packaging, according to not-yet-published research from BioCycle. In practice, getting your compostable plastic into one of those plants means living in one of just a few cities—San Francisco, Seattle, parts of New York—that picks up compost just like trash and recycling and trucks it to a plant. Everyone else is left in compost deserts, Michel said. In Ohio, “the only way for me to compost is in my backyard,” he said. Cities as big as Atlanta do not have a composting plant within an hour’s drive; the entire state of Alabama does not have a single place that can digest compostable plastic.

The companies using these products are aware of these limitations. Consider the 10-email exchange I had with Cava, trying to confirm that the fast-casual chain does in fact use compostable bowls, which the spokesperson originally outright denied. It ended with the spokesperson acknowledging that “CAVA’s bowl containers are primarily made of bagasse” (which is made from sugar cane and is compostable) but that “there are some limitations to the availability of composting facilities, which is why CAVA is careful about how they talk about it.” And in the long term, companies who are handing out single-use items should be trying to switch over. A single fork turned back into biomass is more biodegradation than most of the plastic in human history has ever done. So much of the world’s plastic is used for packaging that, with the proper infrastructure, “if everything that’s now plastic was made out of compostable plastic, then it would dramatically change what we are looking at,” Ramani Narayan, a chemical engineer at Michigan State who studies renewable plastics, told me. The equivalent of a dump truck’s worth of plastic sloshes into the ocean every minute, entangling wildlife, poisoning the soil and water, and splitting into microplastics that accumulate up the food chain; replacing that with something even marginally less permanent would be a positive change.

As long as compostable plastic is ending up in landfills, though, the math is less favorable. In a dump, these products may not biodegrade for more than a century. And they can have an additional knock against them: In the anaerobic conditions of a landfill, certain types of compostable plastic can also spew methane, a greenhouse gas that is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

Compostable plastic might backfire in other ways too. A push against single-use plastic has made lots of people reconsider, even if briefly, whether to use that plastic plate or bowl or straw; compostable products implicitly signal to consumers that they can use these instead and walk away with a lighter conscience. “Marketing people are always asking me, ‘So what about compostable plastic?’” says Claire Sand, a packaging consultant for major companies, because consumers badly want this to be the answer to single-use plastic. In the U.S., all certified compostable products are required to have a label making clear that they are meant to be composted in “aerobic municipal and industrial composting facilities.” But fine print is easy to overlook with all the green colors and brand names, including EarthChoice, Eco-Baggeez, Greenware, and Responsible Products. And though a plastic takeout container can live a second life as pseudo-Tupperware, and a plastic bag as a garbage liner, many compostable versions just don’t cut it.

Both compostable plastic—and America’s composting network—will get better. Diverting compostable stuff from landfills is so important for making a dent in emissions that the federal government is throwing $90 million at it. Plenty of companies are also trying to make better compostable products: Can I interest you in plastic that turns into protein powder, banana-peel plastic, avocado plastic, and seaweed plastic? Still, finding the right balance between durability and compostability is tough. No one wants a box of spoons that rots after three weeks in your cupboard.

If you must buy compostable plastic products, some are better than others. Look for items that are certified by the Biodegradable Products Institute (BPI), and whenever possible, TÜV OK Compost Home, Michel said, a European standard that signifies that the plastic should disintegrate even in home compost piles. And try to avoid anything made of polylactic acid, or PLA, which is the among most onerous biodegradable plastic to compost, though also the most popular. Broadly speaking, the less something is like real plastic, the easier it is to break down. The best compostable utensil is not embossed with COMPOSTABLE or green in color but made of untreated wood. “It is inherently compostable and does not really pose any more of an issue than a branch falling off of a tree,” Michel said.

The other alternative is, well, not just swapping one kind of single-use plastic with another. Somehow, metal straws have joined the pantheon of reusable water bottles and coffee cups that people trek around, but you know what is already far more readily available? Silverware. Earlier this week, just after tossing my soggy fast-casual bowl to its ominous fate in the trash can, I noticed a clean metal fork sitting on my desk, just waiting for me to use it.

This story is part of the Atlantic Planet series supported by HHMI’s Science and Educational Media Group.

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