Perreault Magazine - 45 -
In the Los Angeles area alone, 10 metric tons of plastic fragments—like grocery bags, straws and soda bottles—are carried into the Pacific Ocean every day.
Over the last ten years we have produced more plastic than during the whole of the last century.
50 percent of the plastic we use, we use just once and throw away.
Enough plastic is thrown away each year to circle the earth four times.
We currently recover only five percent of the plastics we produce.
The average American throws away approximately 185 pounds of plastic per year.
Plastic accounts for around 10 percent of the total waste we generate.
The production of plastic uses around eight percent of the world’s oil production (bioplastics are not a good solution as they require food source crops).
Americans throw away 35 billion plastic water bottles every year (source: Brita)
Plastic in the ocean breaks down into such small segments that pieces of plastic from a one liter bottle could end up on every mile of beach throughout the world.
Annually approximately 500 billion plastic bags are used worldwide. More than one million bags are used every minute.
46 percent of plastics float (EPA 2006) and it can drift for years before eventually concentrating in the ocean gyres.
It takes 500-1,000 years for plastic to degrade.
Resource: Lynn Hasselberger, The Green Divas
EcoWatch