Study finds 7B tons of plastic made since ’50 pollutes Earth

More than 9 billion tons of plastic has been produced since 1950, 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 World War II found that only 2 billion tons of that plastic is still in use. Seven billion tons is stuck on Earth as garbage in landfills, recycled trash or pollution in the environment, including deep oceans, where it’s been discovered in the mouths of whales and the bellies of dead seabirds that mistook it for food. A small amount is incinerated.

As plastic becomes nearindestructible mountains of garbage on land and swirling vortexes of trash on the high seas, humans keep making more. Half of the plastic that people mostly use once and toss was created in the past 30 years, the study says.

Plastic’s most lucrative market is packaging commonly seen in grocery stores. It could be in front of you right now.

In 1960, plastic accounted for just 1 percent of junk in municipal landfills across the world. As singlepackage containers led to an explosion in convenience and use, that number grew to 10 percent in 2005. A recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimated the amount of plastic debris floating in the open ocean at 7,000 to 35,000 tons.

“If current trends continue, the researchers predict over 13 billion tons of plastic will be discarded in landfills or in the environment by 2050,” the American Association for the Advancement of Science said in a statement announcing the new study’s release Wednesday. It was published in the journal Science Advances.

“I think for me that’s the single most surprising thing, the implication of the large growth rate,” said Roland Geyer, one of the authors. Another surprise, he said, is how far the United States lags behind China and Europe in recycling plastic material.

In the study, Geyer wrote, “On the basis of limited available data, the highest recycling rates in 2014 were in Europe (30 percent) and China (25 percent), whereas in the United States, plastic recycling has remained steady at 9 percent.”

Recycling only delays plastic’s inevitable trip to a trash bin.

Incineration is the only way to assure that plastic is eliminated, and Europe and China by far lead the United States in that category as well, up to 40 percent compared with 16 percent.

But burning plastic is risky because if the emissions aren’t carefully filtered, harmful chemicals become air pollution.

Plastic’s vampire-like life cycle is nothing new. What’s new with this research is its use of plasticproduction data with “product lifetime distributions from eight different industrial sectors” 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.

“I think most experts agree these polymers ... are going to be with us for decades if not centuries,” Geyer said.

“I think the danger is permanent global contamination with plastics,” he said. “It’s just going to be everywhere.”