Though the world hadn’t seen so much as a plastic bag prior to about 1950, it is now awash in them. For the first time, scientists have calculated how much plastic humans have produced throughout history and came up with a staggering figure: more than 9 billion tons (or 8.3 billion metric tons).
Most of this plastic ends up in dumps and the great outdoors. Compared with other mass-produced substances, plastic is typically used once or for a brief time and then thrown away. To date, humans have junked 7 billion tons of plastic waste, only 9 percent of which has been recycled. A total of 12 percent has been incinerated, and 79 percent ended up in landfills or the environment, particularly the ocean. At the current rate, humans will produce 13 billion tons of plastic waste by 2050.
“Humankind is making an incredible amount of plastics, even more than we thought it would be, and it keeps increasing,” Geyer says. “And we’re not very good at dealing with the waste.”
Many of the figures around plastic production boggle the mind. For example, more than 480 billion plastic drinking bottles were sold in 2016 worldwide, an increase from 300 billion a decade ago.
Studies keep finding more and more plastic in freshwater sources and the ocean. For example, 4 million to 13 million tons of plastic were estimated to enter the ocean in 2010 alone, and that number has almost certainly gone up. Another study suggested there were 270,000 tons of plastic floating on the ocean’s surface and much more on the seafloor
Read more: http://www.newsweek.com/plastic-production-pollution-9-billion-tons-recycling-639226