US scientists have calculated the total amount of plastic ever made and put the number at 8.3 billion tonnes.
It is an astonishing mass of material that has essentially been created only in the last 65 years or so.
The 8.3 billion tonnes is as heavy as 25,000 Empire State Buildings in New York, or a billion elephants.
Subscription Note:
Choosing to subscribe to this topic will automatically register you for email notifications for comments and updates on this thread.
Email notifications will be sent out daily by default unless specified otherwise on your account which you can edit by going to your userpage here and clicking on the subscriptions tab.
It is actually more like 1.5 billion of you average large elephants going by the given number of total plastic.
Also note their is less than a million elephants left in the world.
So by weight there is more than 2000 times as much plastic out there then the weight of all the elephants alive today.
Or put in another way, we humans produce more in weight in plastic in around 2 weeks then all the weight of all the elephants alive today.
Plastic was a great invention ... it's light weight and cheap to produce while delivering an acceptable level of quality for some products. Unfortunately, it is being used for single-use or limited-use purposes as a means to increase profits for the producer's stockholders.
And while that MAY lead to lower prices at the retail level, it totally ignores the extended cost to our local communities and to mother Earth with non-degradable trash that is threatening our waterways, wildlife, sea life, land animals, our soil, and mankind itself. This is a hidden, yet measurable (clean-up etc.), cost that is passed on to consumers that isn't reflected in the retail price.
The desire for lower-cost products and the never-ending drive for ever-increasing profits is burying us ... literally!
Early in my working life (mid 1970s) I worked for a Pepsi-Cola distributorship. I remember very well when disposable containers were introduced. The rest is history.