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.
Americans throw away 35 billion plastic water bottles every year
Annually approximately 500 billion plastic bags are used worldwide. More than one million bags are used every minute.
46 percent of plastics float and it can drift for years before eventually concentrating in the ocean gyre.
It takes 500-1,000 years for plastic to degrade.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is located in the North Pacific Gyre off the coast of California and is the largest ocean garbage site in the world. This floating mass of plastic is twice the size of Texas, with plastic pieces outnumbering sea life six to one.
Plastic constitutes approximately 90 percent of all trash floating on the ocean's surface, with 46,000 pieces of plastic per square mile.
One million sea birds and 100,000 marine mammals are killed annually from plastic in our oceans.
44 percent of all seabird species, 22 percent of cetaceans, all sea turtle species and a growing list of fish species have been documented with plastic in or around their bodies.
Plastic chemicals can be absorbed by the body—93 percent of Americans age six or older test positive for BPA (a plastic chemical). Some of these compounds found in plastic have been found to alter hormones or have other potential human health effects.
