Almost all of the plastic produced since 1950 is still sitting in landfills. By KATE WHEELING
Man's legacy on Earth
may be the piles of plastics we've mass produced - roughly 8.3 billion metric
tons so far, according to a new
study published today in Science Advances. In the first ever
global analysis of plastic production, researchers from universities across the
United States combined production data with product lifetime information from
various industries - such as construction, packaging, and consumer goods - to find
out how much plastic humans have made, and how much of it is still around.
"You can't manage
what you don't measure," says Roland
Geyer, an associate professor at the University of California–Santa Barbara
and lead author on the new study. "I think in order to manage plastics
sustainably hopefully and stem the tide of plastics we need to know how much
we're making and where it goes." About 30 percent of
all plastics made since the middle of the 20th century are still in use, but
the vast majority of plastic
waste, it turns out, is still around as well. Just 12 percent
has been incinerated—a process that presents its own environmental and
public-health perils—and only 9 percent was recycled.
"BETWEEN 2002
AND 2015 WE MADE THE EXACT SAME AMOUNT OF PLASTIC THAT WE MADE BETWEEN 1950 AND
2002."
There were vast
regional differences in recycling, however: The recycling rate in the U.S. was
9 percent, compared to 30 percent in Europe, and 25 percent in China. Since
none of the most commonly used plastics are biodegradable, nearly 80 percent of
the more than six billion metric tons of plastic waste generated between the
1950s (when the large-scale production of synthetic plastics really took off)
and 2015 is accumulating in our landfills, ocean basins, far-flung islands, and other natural environments… read more:
https://psmag.com/environment/almost-all-of-the-plastic-produced-since-1950-is-still-in-landfillsMore posts on plastic
