Majority of plastic made since 1950 is still around

Scale of material’s usage, waste shocked researchers

More than eight billion tonnes of plastic has been produced since1950, and the vast majority of it is still around.

A new study that tracked the global manufacture and distribution of plastics since they became widespread after the Second World War found that only 1.8 billion tonnes of that plastic is still in use. Six billion tonnes is stuck on Earth as garbage in landfills, recycled trash or pollution in the environment, including deep oceans. Only a small amount is eliminated in incinerators. But humans keep making more. Half of the plastic that people mostly use once and toss away was created in the past 30 years, the study says.

In 1960, plastic accounted for just 1 per cent of junk in municipal landfills across the world. As single-package containers led to an explosion in convenience and use, that number grew to 10 per cent in 2005. Plastic’s vampire-like life cycle is nothing new. What’s new with this research is its use of plastic-production data with to build a scientific model that showed “how long plastics are in use before they reach the end of their useful lifetimes and are discarded,” the study said.

Roland Geyer, an associate professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, wrote the study with two colleagues.

He said the scale of the world’s plastic consumption and waste shocked them, and he hopes politicians, conservationists and consumers will pay attention to what they found.

“I think the danger is permanent global contamination with plastics,” he said. “It’s just going to be everywhere, in the soil, in the ocean, in the sediment of the ocean floor, and it’s just going to accumulate.”