Plastic In Our World

1. Since the 1950s, around 8.3 billion tons of plastic have been produced worldwide.

2. In some parts of the world, using plastic is already illegal.

3. 73% of beach litter worldwide is plastic.

4. A million plastic bottles are bought around the world every minute.

5. Worldwide, about 2 million plastic bags are used every minute.

6. 90% of plastic polluting our oceans is carried by just 10 rivers.

7. Plastic is killing more than 1.1 million seabirds and animals every year.

8. The average person eats 70,000 microplastics each year.

9. The average time that a plastic bag is used for is … 12 minutes.

10. Over the past 50 years, world plastic production has doubled.

Plastic Oceans Information

The proliferation of plastic products in the last several decades has been extraordinary. Quite simply, humans are addicted to this nearly indestructible material. The world is producing over million tons of plastic every year, 50% of which is for single-use purposes – utilized for just a few moments, but on the planet for at least several hundred years. More than 8 million tons of plastic is dumped into our oceans every year.

Plastic is cheap and incredibly versatile with properties that make it ideal for many applications. However, these qualities have also resulted in it becoming an environmental issue. We have developed a “disposable” lifestyle and estimates are that around 50% of plastic is used just once and thrown away.

Plastic is a valuable resource in many ways, but plastic pollution is an unnecessary and unsustainable waste of that resource.

• Packaging is the largest end-use market segment accounting for just over 40% of total plastic usage.

• Annually approximately 500 billion plastic bags are used worldwide. More than one million bags are used every minute.

• A plastic bag has an average “working life” of 15 minutes.

• Over the last ten years we have produced more plastic than during the whole of the last century.

Beverage Bottles Alone

• According to the Container Recycling Institute, 100.7 billion plastic beverage bottles were sold in the U.S. in 2014, or 315 bottles per person.

• 57% of those units were plastic water bottles: 57.3 billion sold in 2014. This is up from 3.8 billion plastic water bottles sold in 1996, the earliest year for available data.

• The process of producing bottled water requires around 6 times as much water per bottle as there is in the container.

• 14% of all litter comes from beverage containers. When caps and labels are considered, the number is higher.

** Other Plastic Oceans Resources: Research Papers, Videos and Infographics.

• U.N. Will Push Ahead With First Ever Legally-Binding Treaty to Cut Plastic Waste |Market Watch | March 2, 2022 | A United Nations environmental panel has agreed to a mandate to negotiate a legally binding treaty addressing the full lifecycle of plastic from production to disposal.

• Plastic waste has more than DOUBLED globally since 2000, with 353 million tonnes now produced every year, report warns | Daily Mail | February 22, 2022 | Plastic waste has more than doubled globally since 2000, with a whopping 353 million tonnes produced in 2019, a new report has warned. The report, by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, found that despite this surge in plastic waste, just nine per cent was successfully recycled.

• Plastic waste treaty: expert Q&A on the promise of a global agreement to reduce pollution | The Conversation | March 4, 2022 | The flow of plastic entering the ocean is expected to double by 2040. To prevent this tsunami of difficult-to-decompose waste, experts have proposed a global treaty which could oblige all nations to reduce how much plastic they produce and emit to the environment.