'Plastic planet'
Humans have created 8.3 billion metric tonnes of plastics since early 1950s, and most of it now resides in landfills or the natural environment, a study has found.
Researchers, including those from the University of Georgia (UGA) in the US, found that by 2015, humans had generated 8.3 billion metric tonnes of plastics, 6.3 billion tonnes of which had already become waste.
Of that total waste, only 9 per cent was recycled, 12 per cent was incinerated and 79 per cent accumulated in landfills or the natural environment, researchers said. If current trends continue, roughly 12 billion metric tonnes of plastic waste will be in landfills or the natural environment by 2050, they said.
"Most plastics do not biodegrade in any meaningful sense, so the plastic waste humans have generated could be with us for hundreds or even thousands of years," said Jenna Jambeck, associate professor of engineering at UGA.
Global production of plastics increased from 2 million metric tonnes in 1950 to over 400 million metric tonnes in 2015, according to the study published in the journal Science Advances, outgrowing most other human-made materials.
Plastics' largest market is packaging, and most of those products are used once and discarded.
The same team of researchers led a 2015 study published in the journal Science that calculated the magnitude of plastic waste going into the ocean. They estimated that 8 million metric tonnes of plastic entered the oceans in 2010.
The researchers cautioned that they do not seek the total removal of plastic from the marketplace, but rather a more critical examination of plastic use and its end-of-life value.
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