Plastic Waste

Are you still using plastic water bottles and plastic utensils like straws, forks, knives and spoons? You should really consider converting to a reusable version. There are so many negative effects of plastic on the earth.  Plastic pollutes our oceans, beaches, and fills our land fills with unnecessary waste. Plastic uses a lot of energy and water to produce. For an example to make a typical one liter plastic water bottle it takes around two liters of water during the process.  So one liter of water represents 3 liters of water consumption. While making that one liter of water it takes 4 million joules of energy to create and for every ton of plastic produced it creates three tons of C02.

Facts about plastic waste

There are five large floating plastic waste islands in the ocean right now. One of them is located halfway between Hawaii and California, this island of waste is double the size of Texas and has anything imaginable that is plastic related on it.  

Plastic can take over 1,000 years to decompose in and our landfills are jammed packed with plastic.

Recycling one ton of plastic saves the equivalent of 1,000 to 2,000 gallons of gasoline. 

10% of the plastic we use yearly ends up in the ocean. That’s equivalent to 700 billion plastic bottles in our oceans every year.  

Since the 1950’s plastic has been produced.  That is about 8.3 billion tons of plastic produced worldwide.  That is equivalent to the weight of more than 800,000 Eiffel Towers.  And only 9% has been recycled.  

There are some parts of the world where using plastic is illegal.  For example, Kenya has the toughest laws against plastic bags. If a Kenyan is caught producing plastic bags they will risk imprisonment for up to four years or fines of over $40,000.  

One million plastic bottles are purchased every minute of the day.  That number is set to increase by 20% by 2021 if we as a world do not change.  And only 7% of those bottles were collected to be recycled in 2016.

Worldwide, around 2 million plastic bags are used every minute.  That would make it anywhere between 500 billion and 1 trillion plastic bags used worldwide every year. For one example New York City uses about 23 billion plastic bags yearly.  

6.90% of plastic polluting is carried to our oceans from just 10 rivers.  Researchers say that just 10 rivers across Asia and Africa carry 90% of plastics that end up in our oceans.