I take some efforts to limit my plastic used: no bottled water, bring my own bags for groceries, get limited takeout/to-go boxes and when I do try to limit to places that don’t use plastic containers, etc. But plastic in the world we live in is inevitable, even if you don’t use directly. Every moment you are breating you are indirectly using plastic. Hell, even after you’re dead!
If I stop to think of even my limited daily use of plastic, and I multiply that by just the USA population of 330,000,000 or so, it is an absurd amount of plastic, which I frankly can’t even comprehended.
So I had some questions about plastic use by humans, and I found some answers. Check them out below.
How much plastic waste do Humans create each year?
The world produces around 350 million tonnes of plastic waste each year.
https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-plastic-waste-ends-up-in-the-ocean
How much of the worlds produced plastic ends up in the Ocean?
One-quarter of that – 19 million tonnes – is leaked to the environment. 13 million tonnes to terrestrial environments, and 6 million tonnes to rivers or coastlines.
1.7 million tonnes of this is then transported to the ocean: 1.4 million tonnes from rivers, and 0.3 million tonnes from coastlines. The rest of the plastic waste that was leaked into aquatic environments accumulated in rivers and lakes.
That means that around 0.5% of world’s plastic waste ends up in the oceans.
https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-plastic-waste-ends-up-in-the-ocean
What is the carbon footprint of the plastics industry?
Indeed, plastics are made from fossil fuels and cause greenhouse gas emissions at every stage of their life cycle. The plastic industry’s global carbon footprint in 2020 was 1.3 billion metric tons — twice as big as Canada’s — and it’s expected to grow as fossil fuel companies seek to offset declining demand for oil and gas used in the power and transportation sectors.
That’s pretty fun huh?