How much of an effect does plastic have on our environment?
While there’s no denying the convenience factor of the material, it is seriously starting to pile up… no pun intended.
The easiest way to understand just how big of a magnitude plastic is effecting our world by, is visually and compared to scale.
Let’s take a look.
One Hour
Every single hour, nearly 55 million plastic bottles are thrown out worldwide. This is not just a country problem, this is a global problem. When stacked together, the pile would be higher than the Brazilian statue, Christ The Redeemer.
Even at over 125 feet, the statue looks almost small compared to one hour of global waste.
Daily & Monthly
You thought an hour was bad? Over the span of one day on Earth, over 1.3 Billion bottles are discarded. That’s halfway up the Eiffel Tower… Skip ahead to the average month, when the Eiffel Tower seems like a toy compared to the towering 40 Billion discarded bottles.
A Decade
Let’s see just how much of a visual impact a decade a waste has.
Over the last ten years, over 4 trillion bottles have been discarded, making a almost alien like mountain of waste over the entire skyline of Manhattan.
Yet.. it’s still not as bad as it gets. Plastic bottles are just a tiny percentage of single use plastic world wide. Other common examples of products we use everyday include plastic bags, cups, straws, lids, packaging and more.
Only a minuscule amount of 6% of all plastic since the 1950’s has been recycled, with global recycling rates in despair since China’s restriction on foreign plastic. Only time will tell if our world’s government’s will get their act in order to prevent any more pile ups.
All pictures originally sourced from REUTERS/Simon Scarr, Marco Hernandez.
