Environmental pollution from use of tetraethyl lead in gasoline spread to everywhere on earth — one of the first people raising the alarm about it was a geologist named Clair Cameron Patterson who was annoyed that all his samples, even from remote islands and things, were contaminated with lead

Yep.. I am in a pretty remote location and our lands are fucked with everything from microplastics to radiation levels to blue jean fibres to .... and we essentially never had access to commodities or industrial production until the 80s, and many places still don't really have much access to anything, yet our lands are chock-full of a whole bunch of bullshit that was produced by people thousands of miles away.