Continuous growth for more than 50 years. The production of plastics increased from 1.5 million. T in 1950 at ~322 million. More than 9 billion tons of plastic have been manufactured since the 1950s, and the vast majority has been thrown away, according to a new study.
The problem of plastic waste is an issue that is increasingly difficult to ignore, since it is estimated that there are currently 150 million tons of plastic in the world's oceans and another 12.2 million tons each year, most of which come from terrestrial sources and can cause significant damage to marine fauna if ingested, as demonstrated by a study carried out by the Grantham Institute of Imperial College London in the Arctic Circle. But plastics have become so pervasive that you can't go anywhere without finding plastic waste in our environment, including our oceans. The document states that it is the first attempt to measure the total amount of plastic produced since the beginning of mass plastic production in the middle of the 20th century. This document provides reliable data not only on the amount of plastic we have manufactured over the years, but also on its composition and the amount and type of additives contained in the plastic. For example, researchers estimated that the amount of plastic being used now is 30 percent of all the plastic that has ever been produced.
Most packaging plastics stop being used the same year they are produced, while construction plastics that stop being used were produced decades earlier, when production quantities were much lower. The use of plastics was characterized by discretized normal logarithmic distributions, LTDi (j), which indicates the fraction of plastics from the industrial sector that I used for j years (fig. Despite the bleak picture shown by the results of the study, the authors insisted that they do not want to remove plastic from the market, but that they want to see a much more responsible use and sustainable plastic.
