Plastic facts

• It takes over two hundred years for a plastic straw to degrade.
• It takes over 400 years (five lifetimes!) for a single PET plastic drinking bottle to degrade.
• By 2050 (at current rate of pollution) there will be more plastic than fish in the world’s oceans. At the moment, only 14% of global plastic packaging is collected for recycling and only 2% is reused as packaging.
• Crisp packets have been found intact after 33 years.
• Electronic waste is currently the fastest growing solid waste stream, increasing two to three times faster than other waste streams. More broadly, industrial activities currently generate nearly 7.6 billion tons of solid waste in the US each year – that’s 3000% of the total municipal waste generated by Americans annually.

References and further reading:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/how-much-plastic-is-there-in-the-ocean/

https://edition-m.cnn.com/2018/04/11/health/sperm-whale-plastic-waste-trnd/index.html

https://edition-m.cnn.com/2018/04/22/health/microplastics-land-and-air-pollution-intl/index.html

Whale suffocation from plastic:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-44344468