Over the past 50 years, world plastic production has doubled. While increasing numbers of organizations and countries are banning plastic use and production, the world’s leading plastic manufacturers are planning to increase production by almost a third over the next five years, according to the World Economic Forum.
What's The Problem?
Since the 1950s, around 8.3 billion tons of plastic have been produced worldwide. Here are some of the unsettling facts about plastic waste:
- Every piece of plastic ever created still exists today.
- Only 9% of all the plastic products gets recycled.
- Each minute, 2 million plastic bags are being used around the world equal to 500 billion or more annually.
- The average time that a plastic bag is used for is … 12 minutes.
- 500 million plastic straws are used in America every day.
- At least 8 million tons of plastic enters the oceans each year.
- By 2050, there will be more plastic than fish in the world’s oceans.
- Each year, 100,000 marine animals mistake plastic debris for food.
- Plastic is killing more than 1.1 million seabirds and animals every year.
- 73% of all beach litter is plastic. The most common litter includes filters from cigarette butts, bottles, bottle caps, food wrappers, grocery bags, and polystyrene containers.
- More than 90% of all birds and fish are believed to have plastic particles in their stomach. It’s because plastic breaks up into tiny pieces in the sea, which are then consumed by fish and other sea animals.
- This becomes a human health issue as the average person eats 70,000 microplastics each year. That works out to about 100 bits of microplastic over the course of just one meal, according to a study published in Environmental Pollution.
