Plastic Pollution: The Age of Unsolvable Problems
How bad is the situation with plastic pollution? Rather bad, by all means. Citing from a recent paper by Geyer et al., more than 8 billion tons of plastic have been produced since the 1950s. Of this plastic, 9% percent was recycled, 12% was incinerated, the rest is in part still in use, in part dispersed in the ecosystem. It is this mass of plastics, billions of tons, which form the pollution we see today. It is almost one ton of plastic waste for every human being living today. Imagine if it were magically to appear in your living room: one ton for every member of your family.
Still following Geyer et al., in 2015 the world produced 380 million tons of plastics from fossil hydrocarbons. To get some idea of how polluting this mass is, we can compare it to the total carbon emissions produced by hydrocarbon combustion, which today can be estimated to be around 9 billion tons of carbon per year. Plastic is mainly carbon, but we should take into account that the process of creating it cannot be 100% efficient. Anyway, we are interested here only in an order of magnitude comparison so we can say that about 4% of the fossil hydrocarbons we extract become plastics.
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