How much single use plastic is produced each year

The Problem With Plastic Bags

Plastic bags start out as fossil fuels and end up as deadly waste in landfills and the ocean. Birds often mistake shredded plastic bags for food, filling their stomachs with toxic debris. For hungry sea turtles, it's nearly impossible to distinguish between jellyfish and floating plastic shopping bags. Fish eat thousands of tons of plastic a year, transferring it up the food chain to bigger fish and marine mammals. Microplastics are also consumed by people through food and in the air. It’s estimated that globally, people consume the equivalent of a credit card of plastic every week,1 and it’s expected that there will be more plastic than fish in the sea by 2050.2

The fossil fuel industry plans to increase plastic production by 40% over the next decade. These oil giants are rapidly building petrochemical plants across the United States to turn fracked gas into plastic. This means more plastic in our oceans, more greenhouse gas emissions and more toxic air pollution, which exacerbates the climate crisis that often disproportionately affects communities of color.

1. Americans use 100 billion plastic bags a year, which require 12 million barrels of oil to manufacture.3
2. Americans use an average of 365 plastic bags per person per year. People in Denmark use an average of four plastic bags per year.4
3. It only takes about 14 plastic bags for the equivalent of the gas required to drive one mile.5
4. In 2015 about 730,000 tons of plastic bags, sacks and wraps were generated (including PS, PP, HDPE, PVC & LDPE) in the United States, but more than 87% of those items are never recycled, winding up in landfills and the ocean.6
5. About 34% of dead leatherback sea turtle have ingested plastics.7
6. The plastic typically used in bottles, bags and food containers contains chemical additives such as endocrine disruptors, which are associated with negative health effects including cancers, birth defects and immune system suppression in humans and wildlife.8
7. It takes 1,000 years for a plastic bag to degrade in a landfill. Unfortunately, the bags don't break down completely but instead photo-degrade, becoming microplastics that absorb toxins and continue to pollute the environment.9
8. Chemical leachates from plastic bags impair the growth of the world’s most important microorganisms, Prochlorococcus, a marine bacterium that provides one tenth of the world’s oxygen.10
9. There were 1.9 million grocery bags and other plastic bags collected in the 2018 International Coastal Cleanup.11
10. In 2014 California became the first state to ban plastic bags. As of March 2018, 311 local bag ordinances have been adopted in 24 states, including Hawaii.12 As of July 2018, 127 countries have adopted some form of legislation to regulate plastic bags.13

Ways You Can Help

1. Support the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, which would phase out throwaway plastics, hold the industry responsible for its waste and pause construction on new plastic-making plants. Ask your members of Congress to cosponsor this crucial bill aimed at tackling the plastic pollution crisis head on.
2. Practice waste prevention first and choose to reuse whenever possible. Make sure to always bring a reusable bag when shopping. By regularly washing your bags and drying them thoroughly, you can reuse them over and over.14
3. One company, Formosa Plastics, is trying to build a mega-polluting petrochemical plant in Louisiana that would harm a Black community, degrade wetlands, and deepen the plastic pollution crisis. Sign the petition asking President Biden to revoke Formosa Plastics’ federal permit, which is currently suspended and under reevaluation by the Army Corps of Engineers.
4. President Biden can address the plastic pollution crisis rapidly through executive action. Demand that he take bold action on plastics for our health, climate and wildlife.

Learn more about how plastic pollution threatens wildlife.

How big is the plastic pollution? How much plastic is in the sea? And how much is actually recycled? These are all questions that are not easy to answer. We have only been aware of the ‘plastics soup’ phenomenon for about 25 years.

Slowly but surely, the answers are trickling in from the hundreds of scientists around the world who are trying to get a handle on both the extent and the consequences of the problem. To provide you with the following plastic facts and figures, we have made a selection from the scientific research we consider reliable. The sources used are listed.

Which countries are the biggest plastic polluters?

 The average European throws away 174 kilos of packaging waste away every year, of which 19% is plastic. So on average, every person in Europe adds 33 kilos of plastic packaging to the mountain of plastic waste every year.¹

These figures are often a lot higher in other regions of the world. According to research in 2016, the Americans are the biggest plastic polluters.²

How much plastic ends up in the plastic soup?

 More than half the 9.2 billion tons of plastic that has been produced up to now – about 5 billion tons – has ended up as waste in landfill or has simply ended up in the environment.¹ Of this, between 5 and 13 million tons of plastic enter the oceans.²

In 2017, two groups of scientists, independently of each other, discovered that 90% of all the plastic in the ocean was brought there by 10 major rivers which included the Nile, the Yangtze and the Amazon.³ In 2021, that statistic was overturned by new research.4 This research showed that 80% of the plastic in the ocean was not emitted by just a small group of rivers, but by more than 1,000 rivers. And that most of the waste was not carried by the biggest rivers, but by the small rivers that flow through heavily populated areas. It appeared that it was not the Yangtze but the Pasig, that flows through Manila, the capital city of the Philippines, that brings the most plastic to sea.

Apart from all the plastic waste that comes from land, the fisheries are also a huge source of plastic pollution.

Microplastics on land

 These days everyone has heard the term ‘plastic soup’, but the reality is that the fields where our crops grow are 4 to 23 times more heavily polluted with microplastics than the oceans.¹

The microplastics that are intentionally added to our toiletries and cosmetics flow from our bathrooms into sewers. The sewer sludge, with plastic and all, is later spread on the land as fertiliser. Recent research shows that microplastics are then absorbed by vegetables and fruit such as carrots and apples through their root systems, and thus end up on our plates.²

To what extent is plastic a contributing factor to climate change?

Science is also looking more at the role that the production, incineration and recycling of plastic and plastic pollution play in climate change. After all, plastic is made of fossil fuels. There is a great demand for research into the effects that the microplastics contained in the ice caps and in the air may have on the speed at which the earth is warming.

If we want to limit the warming of the earth to one and a half degrees by 2050, we should not emit more than 570 billion tons of CO2. Of this, 10% to 13% will be emitted by the production of plastic and the incineration of plastic waste.¹

How many single

How much plastic is produced each year 2022?

How much plastic waste is produced each year?

What percentage of plastic produced is for single