QUICK FACTS:
HOW DO PLASTICS END UP IN OUR OCEANS?
1. Scientists have shown that up to 12 million tons of plastic are entering our oceans every year. That’s a rubbish truck full every minute. Single-use packaging for food and drink is a particularly common part of the problem.
2. About 1/5 of marine litter is made up of fishing gear, materials lost at sea by accident, industrial losses or illegal dumping. Roughly 4/5 (80%) of marine litter comes from land.
3. When plastic waste is collected and transported to landfill sites, it can be at risk of falling off, blowing away and ending up in the environment. Even in landfills, plastic is at risk of blowing away and ending up in drains, rivers and oceans because of its light weight.
4. Plastic litter end up carried by wind and rain into our drainage networks or rivers, where they eventually flow into the sea. Major rivers around the world carry an estimated 1.15 – 2.41 million tons of plastics into the oceans every year.
5. Lenient standards in industrial processes are responsible for some plastic, particularly small bits of plastic resin pellets called ‘nurdles’ or ‘mermaid’s tears’, getting into the environment, either when products containing plastic are not disposed of properly, or when these plastics escape during the production or transportation processes.
6. Many of the products we use daily, including wet wipes, cotton buds, sanitary products, microbeads from cosmetics and cleaning products and microfibers from clothes, are flushed down toilets or sinks and released into our waterways. Microbeads and microfibers are too small to be filtered out by wastewater plants and end up being consumed by marine animals.
(Sources: greenpeace.org.uk and wwf.org.uk)
QUICK FACTS:
WHY DO SO MUCH MARINE PLASTICS SEEM TO ORIGINATE FROM DEVELOPING COUNTRIES?
1. 90% of marine plastics come from just 10 rivers in the world. 8 of these are in Asia: Yangtze, Indus, Yellow (Huanghe), Hai He, Ganges, Pearl, Amur and Mekong. 2 are in Africa: Nile and Niger.
2. These rivers all have 2 things in common: A generally high population living in the surrounding region – sometimes into the hundreds of millions – and an inadequate and flawed waste collection and management process.
3. Nearly 1/3 of plastics in the world are not properly collected, recycled or disposed of, as these countries lack strong waste management infrastructure. These plastics end up as litter in the world’s lands, rivers and oceans.
4. The world is on track to exceed 9.5 billion people by 2050, with fewer living in poverty than today. Thanks to the rapid industrialisation of developing countries like China, India and Malaysia, the global middle class is exploding, meaning a lot more people want to buy a lot more things. Often these fancy new things are sold in ways that were uncommon 20-30 years ago – vegetables individually wrapped in clingfilm, party packs and door gifts, and individually wrapped biscuits and crackers.
5. This does not mean that wealthier or developed nations do not need to address their use of plastic – they still do! All nations and corporations must make efforts to reduce plastic production and use. The problem isn’t merely that plastic waste is not managed properly. It is that way too much plastic is being produced. Even in developed nations such as the UK, only 1/3 of plastic packaging used in consumer products is recycled.
[Sources: World Economic Forum (weforum.org), World Resources Institute (wri.org) and Ellen Macarthur Foundation (ellenmacarthurfoundation.org)]
QUICK FACTS:
WHY ISN’T PLASTIC RECYCLING ENOUGH?
1. Existing recycling technology isn’t good enough. Most plastics that are recycled are shredded and reprocessed into lower-value plastics, such as polyester carpet fibre. Only 2% are recycled into products of the same quality. This is largely due to limitations in how plastics can be sorted by chemical composition and cleaned of additives.
2. The trouble is that we are also using a lot more plastics and generating a lot more waste. We use 20 times as much plastic as we did 50 years ago. Businesses create more and more single-use plastics to meet consumers’ expectations for convenience. This is a problem because when exposed to sunlight, oxygen or water, plastics will not biodegrade but will fragment into smaller and smaller particles until these microplastics enter into the food chain, air, soil and water. Latest studies show that plastic also releases methane -- a potent greenhouse gas – as it decomposes.
3. Not all plastic is recyclable. Recycling won’t be able to deal with foam products, microbeads, microfibers, plastic-coated products and oxo-degradable plastic bags. For example, disposable coffee cups are made of high quality cellulose fibres and a polyethylene inner coating that are tightly bonded together and consequently, difficult to separate and recycle.
4. Many developed nations, including those in the European Union, have taken the easy option of exporting plastic waste to China and other developing countries – the same countries lacking sufficient infrastructure to manage their own plastic waste! The assumption is that these plastics are being properly recycled, but in reality, the public and government have little idea where the plastic ultimately ends up after it has been exported. It is likely that poor quality materials end up in the local, inadequate waste management system. The developed world clearly needs a circular economy – one that does not rely on shipping materials halfway around the world for them to be reused, but one that keeps resources in use for as long as possible and recovers and keeps materials in the economic cycle.
[Sources: World Resources Institute (wri.org) and Grantham Institute (granthaminstitute.org)]
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