vladms parent
Talk about it (worked for the ozone layer and some pesticides), use less (not that hard), support any alternative. And I think this works for any topic. The helplessness is a feeling, hard to assess the impact of individual actions, so why bother? You do what you can/think of and continue living - with a critical mass things will move in the right direction.
> Talk about it (worked for the ozone layer and some pesticides)
Partly, if not largely, because we were lucky enough to have an influential politician who had been a chemist:
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-22069768
It was also a much simpler and cheaper to fix issue than micro-plastics because it involved replacing a few substances, used for particular things, that had alternatives.