In a span of just six decades, humanity has produced over 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic as of 2017. Since plastic doesn’t readily degenerate, most of this is in the form of plastic waste today. Together, it would weigh nearly five times as much as the combined cargo of all the world’s ships in 2016.
None of this plastic is going away by itself. And with much of it ‘mismanaged‘ for want of a waste segregation system, many nations end up dumping it in their rivers and seas.
We know that the ocean is increasingly filling up with plastic. A study published in the PLOS-One journal estimated that there were over five trillion pieces of plastic, weighing 250,000 tons in total, in the oceans as of 2014. Giant garbage patches are present in nearly all of the world’s oceans – some patches covering the area of entire continents on the water.
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