9.1 Billion tonnes of plastic and counting

Humanity has been using plastic in one form or another for a very long time. The first recorded mention of it was a natural version as far back as 1284. Early synthetic plastics began to be produced from 1900 up until 1929.

In the 1930’s an industry began to grow around the use of the substance and well known items like Perspex, nylon, and polyethylene appeared. Usage began to accelerate in the 40’s due to the war effort but things really took off from the beginning of the 1950’s when the domestic market saw its potential. Suddenly, plastic became the standard solution for toys, bags, textiles, and fashion and mass production began.

Since the 1950s, we have used and discarded an awful lot of the material. Roland Geyer, an industrial ecologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, led a research team conducting years of intense research They analyzed data from multiple sources around the globe. The conclusion from the data collected was that we had produced 9.1 billion tons of the stuff, but more shockingly, we have only recycled a mere 10% of it.

Estimates say that there is enough of the stuff to bury Manhattan two miles deep, under a weight of material the equivalent of that of 25,000 Empire State Buildings.

Geyer said that: “Half of those 9.1 billion tons we’ve made only in the last 13 years. That, for me, is the most surprising number.”

In the 1950s, only two tons of plastic were manufactured, but by 2015 that figure had shot up to 420 tons and showed no sign of slowing down.

The sad fact is that around 80% of waste plastic does not get recycled but instead ends up dumped in landfills or discarded and lost. In environments such as that, the material can take hundreds, possibly even thousands, of years to break down. Someone once said that, if archaeologists uncover the remains of our society in the future, we will probably become famous for the layer of plastic garbage we’ve strewn all over the planet.

Lakes and oceans are becoming choked with the debris with marine animals and birds eating and getting entangled and stuck in it. In short, a solution needs to be found to combat the problem, and soon. Plastic debris exists in all of the main ocean basins. Estimates say that between four to 12 million metric tons of plastic waste generated on land entered the marine environment in 2010 alone.

Greenpeace published a survey which said that five out of six major soft drinks companies sold their products in single-use plastic bottles.

Most of the monomers used in plastic production, such as ethylene and propylene, derive from fossil hydrocarbons. No commonly used plastics are biodegradable.

Geyer and his team concluded that the biggest source of plastic waste was product packaging. Items such as takeaway cartons, grocery store bags, and bubble wrap tend to get used once only and then discarded. Geyer suggested that a good way to begin to combat the problem was to find a way of reducing the level of plastics used in packaging,

Vice President of the American Chemistry Council, Steve Russell, said that alternatives to the material such as paper, aluminum or glass, take more energy to produce. He says that plastic is, therefore, the greenest option available and that is we didn’t use them then the environmental impact would be even worse.

Clearly, this is a contentious issue, and the plastics industry is not going to admit defeat or scale back anytime soon.