Plastic is everywhere. Bottled water, grocery bags, shower curtains, garbage cans and kitchen utensils are just a few of the ways plastic has made its way into every aspect of our daily lives. Our throwaway mentality, bred and fed by the mass production of plastics, has created a pollution problem that now threatens the very future of humanity.

You likely do not directly experience the impact of the garbage you create while going about day-to-day life. Much of what is produced every day is picked up by a garbage truck and “magically disappears.” But, nothing could be further from the truth, as most garbage is not incinerated or recycled but simply relocated to a landfill or makes its way down storm drains into nearby waterways.

Plastic pollution is an enormous worldwide problem. An estimated 4.7 million tons of plastic ends up in our oceans each year where wave action turns them into a plastic soup, damaging sea life and marine ecosystems. Millions of volunteers participate in cleaning the beaches across the world each year, recording the garbage they find.¹ Of the top 10 items found on beaches across the world, seven are made from plastic.

With an increasing production of plastic and plastic products, this problem is only growing. Roland Geyer, Ph.D., from the University of California at Santa Barbara, led a project to analyze the mass production of plastics. Geyer commented on the team’s focus in the study:

“What we are trying to do is to create the foundation for sustainable materials management. Put simply, you can’t manage what you don’t measure, and so we think policy discussions will be more informed and fact based now that we have these numbers.”

Plastics Are Polymers

From a chemist’s perspective, plastics are polymers. These are extremely long, repetitive molecules primarily made of carbon. But “polymers” are a very broad category that include other compounds such as silicone, from which breast implants and fire retardants are made.²

The shape of the polymer is what gives plastic its flexibility so a product can be molded into any shape. The history of natural polymers dates back before Christ, but it wasn’t until the invention of Bakelite in 1907 that the era of plastics truly began. This was the first synthetic plastic derived from fossil fuel and opened the door to polyester, polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and nylon.

In an effort to produce machinery and support for World War II, petrochemical companies began turning out plastics by the truckload to be used in military vehicles and radar insulation. By the end of the war in 1945 there was an abundance of plastic manufactured with nowhere to go. Thinking outside the box, producers turned their attention to the consumer, and by 1948 the first Tupperware product hit the market.³

Today there are hundreds of thousands of different polymers being produced that can be used for products from microfiber in your clothing to plastic grocery bags. These plastics have been mass produced since 1950 and have created an environmental problem that will not go away.

How Much Is Too Much?

Geyer and colleagues published a recent study in Science Advances in which they estimate that since 1950, 8.3 billion metric tons (18.2 trillion pounds) of virgin plastics have been produced.⁴ This is equivalent in weight to 1 billion elephants⁵ in plastic that will persist in the environment for at least 1,000 years.⁶ Another way of picturing the amount of environmental plastic pollution is to imagine the island of Manhattan buried under 2 miles of plastic garbage.⁷

The researchers estimated that of the 8.3 billion metric tons produced, 6.3 million metric tons are no longer in use. Of this, 9 percent was recycled, 12 percent incinerated and 79 percent left in landfills and other areas of the environment.⁸ Approximately half of the plastic made since 1950 was manufactured in the last 13 years.⁹ This speaks to the rate of growth of the plastic industry over the last 60 years. In Los Angeles alone, 10 metric tons of plastic fragments are carried into the Pacific Ocean every day.¹⁰

Since plastics don’t biodegrade for at least 500 years, and more conservative estimates are closer to 1,000 years, the environment is in grave danger at the rate of plastic production. The estimate is that 12 billion metric tons of plastics will be in landfills, and will have leaked into the waterways and oceans by 2050.¹¹ Scientists estimate that today between 5 million and 13 million metric tons of plastic enter the ocean every year, the primary form of which is microscopic synthetic fibers from clothing.

The ocean is currently filled with 165 million tons of plastic.¹² Now, a report from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation predicts that by 2050 there will be more plastic in the ocean by weight than there are fish.¹³ The buildup of plastic is occurring at greater rates in different areas of the oceans. For instance, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch located in the North Pacific Gyre is the largest ocean garbage site in the world, where the floating mass of garbage is twice the size of Texas and plastic pieces outnumber sea life 6-to-1.¹⁴

Geyer believes his predicted numbers are higher than others since he includes plastics that are woven into fibers and then flushed into waterways after being washed.¹⁵ Approximately 35 percent of plastics produced are for packaging, often used once and then discarded.

Plastics in the oceans have been shown to hurt or kill more than 600 species of marine life, including sea turtles, dolphins, sea birds and whales. Nancy Wallace, marine debris program director for the U.S. National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration commented:¹⁶ “It’s a huge amount of material that we’re not doing anything about. We’re finding plastics everywhere.”