Planet Plastic

[00:00.40] Here’s a staggering statistic. Scientists have calculated the total amount of plastic ever made: 8.3 billion tonnes.

[00:10.23] Looked at another way, that’s as heavy as 25,000 Empire State Buildings or one billion elephants.

[00:16.60] And incredibly, almost all of it has been made in the last 65 years.

[00:22.18] So what’s the problem? Much plastic is in the form of packaging which is used just once and then thrown away.

[00:29.09] According to a major new study from the University of California, 9% of this is recyled, 12% is incinerated and 79% goes to landfill. And because most plastic doesn’t biodegrade, once it’s in the ground, it stays there.

[00:45.03] It’s a situation that has led the paper’s lead author, ecologist Dr Roland Geyer, to say that we are “rapidly heading towards ‘Planet Plastic'”.

[00:53.79] He believes that there’s already enough waste out there to cover the whole of Argentina.

[00:58.57] The team behind this report also estimate that eight million tonnes of plastic waste are escaping into the sea every year.

[01:06.28] This has generated concern that plastic is entering the food chain, though fish and other sea life which ingest the smaller fragments.

[01:13.98] Of course, the reason why there’s so much plastic around is that it’s an amazingly useful material. We can’t get enough of it.

[01:21.68] It’s durable and adaptable, and is used for everything from yoghurt pots to spaceships.

[01:26.46] But it’s precisely this quality which makes it a problem.

[01:29.65] The only way to destroy plastic is to heat or burn it – although this has the side effect of harmful emissions.

[01:36.56] So what’s the alternative, other than using less plastic?

[01:40.54] Oceanographer Dr Erik van Sebille from Utrecht University says we’re facing a “tsunami” of plastic waste, and that the global waste industry needs to “get its act together”.

[01:50.37] Professor Richard Thompson, a marine biologist from Plymouth University, says it’s poor design that’s at fault.

[01:56.74] He says that if products are currently designed “with recyclability in mind”, they could be recyled around 20 times over.

[02:04.71] Dr Geyer agrees: “The holy grail of recycling is to keep material in use and in the loop for ever if you can.

[02:10.82] But it turns out in our study that actually 90% of that material that did get recycled - which I think we calculated was 600 million tonnes - only got recycled once.”