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That's not really known for sure, likely a very long time. It mostly seems to slowly structurally degrade into micro-particles, at the time scales available to us so far. The nearest analogy I'm aware of was the Carboniferous period, which occurred because the lignin in woody plants couldn't be broken down by organisms, so it accumulated in vast quantities in bogs and such. These massive deposits of undecayed organic matter eventually fossilised, under the conditions of temperature and pressure developed by geological formations, into coal and oil.

So a long time might turn out to be a very, very long time indeed.

The Anthropocene will be marked by the plastic-rich strata.
I'm sure at some point down the line, a future generation can use 'old' plastic a a resource. I'm of the (amateur) opinion that plastic should be separated out by type, then stored / sequestered until it can be used as a raw material again, instead of dumped or incinerated as it is now.

Of course, this will take a lot of storage space and logistics, and at the moment it's not cost-effective because plastic is so cheap to produce, but at the same time, I (again as an amateur) see it as a long-term investment.

Up to a point, but a lot of it is already broken down into microparticles and distributed across the surface of the earth. I mean, _all_ of the surface of the Earth - from deep sea bed (1) to beaches (2) to mountains (3) to the Arctic (4).

We're decades late with what you're suggesting. The "long-term investment" did not happen. There is no conceivable way to collect it all up now, and it's in the fossil record for the long term.

1) https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/30/micropla...

2) https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2021/april/over-four-bil...

3) https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/20/micropla...

4) https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/remote-ar...

Don’t forget cleaned
Also a fossil record of chicken bones!

(1) https://www.newscientist.com/article/2187838-when-humans-are...

I read somewhere that 300 million years ago, when trees died, they didn’t rot. It took 60 million for bacteria to evolve to be able to decompose wood. Which is where most our coal comes from.
Those wood decomposing bacteria are the evolutionary slackers of the Carboniferous Era. Our new plastic decomposing bacteria evolved in only 60 years. In 60 million years of evolution they'll have their own space program.
> In 60 million years of evolution they'll have their own space program.

LOL, You mean like Astrophage?

It took a VERY long time for wood to be digested, and there was way more of it around than plastic.
And does the landfills buried before that point become coal and oil :)
Good?
Not everything that is made from plastic is bad, for example things that are made from waste plastic.