Drowning in plastic

The plastic pollution lifecycle shows where we are today, and it’s not a pretty picture. Only 9 percent of the world’s plastic waste is recycled. What happens to the rest? Twelve percent is incinerated, emitting carbon dioxide, and the rest ends up in landfills and ultimately our oceans. Plastic pollution has exploded by a factor of ten since 1980.

a single PVC bottle in a load of 10 000 PET bottles can ruin the entire melt

Specifically, the seventeen million barrels it takes each year to make water bottles for the U.S. market.

The numbers involved are not trivial: in per capita terms the annual generation of plastic packaging waste alone is now close to 40