Plastic production has increased considerably over the past 70 years. In 1950, the world produced just two million tons. It now produces more than 450 million tons. An independent, non-profit media organization dedicated to telling stories about climate solutions and a just future. According to the organizations, their findings highlight the regrettable failure of plastic recycling and add weight to accusations that the plastics industry has not been sincere in its promotion of recycling as a solution to the plastic pollution crisis.
Last week, California's attorney general announced an investigation, the first of its kind, into petrochemical and fossil fuel companies for what he called a “decades-long plastic deception campaign to promote recycling,” even though documents suggest they knew decades ago that recycling infrastructure could never keep up with rising plastic production rates. The report urged companies and legislators to adopt policies that limit the production, use and disposal of plastics, highlighting refillable water bottles, reusable container programs and single-use plastic bans as effective options. The proposed Bill to Get Rid of Plastic Pollution, which was introduced in Congress last year by Senator Jeff Merkeley of Oregon and Representative Alan Lowenthal of California, both Democrats, could also help by stopping the expansion of plastic manufacturing facilities and requiring the plastics industry to pay for and manage the waste it produces. To support our non-profit environmental journalism, please consider disabling your ad blocker to allow ads on Grist. It is a problem that can be solved, and making a difference in this regard would contribute much more to reducing plastic pollution than to considerably reducing plastic production.
The use of plastics was characterized by discretized normal logarithmic distributions, LTDi (j), which indicates the fraction of plastics from the industrial use sector that I used for j years (fig. To carry out their analysis, The Last Beach Cleanup and Beyond Plastics analyzed two sources of data on the total weight of recycled plastic and divided it by the weight of U. 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. Beyond Plastics and The Last Beach Cleanup said that the new data on recycling should be a “wake-up call to the impossibility of recycling plastic”.
