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A Million Bottles a Minute: World's Plastic Binge 'As Dangerous as Climate Change' (theguardian.com)
Should you ever travel to one of the many uninhibited islands that dot the most remote reaches of Earth's oceans, chances are you'll find plastic bottles littering the shore. The Guardian reports: A million plastic bottles are bought around the world every minute and the number will jump another 20 percent by 2021, creating an environmental crisis some campaigners predict will be as serious as climate change. New figures obtained by the Guardian reveal the surge in usage of plastic bottles, more than half a trillion of which will be sold annually by the end of the decade. The demand, equivalent to about 20,000 bottles being bought every second, is driven by an apparently insatiable desire for bottled water and the spread of a western, urbanised "on the go" culture to China and the Asia Pacific region. More than 480bn plastic drinking bottles were sold in 2016 across the world, up from about 300bn a decade ago. If placed end to end, they would extend more than halfway to the sun. By 2021 this will increase to 583.3bn, according to the most up-to-date estimates from Euromonitor International's global packaging trends report. Most plastic bottles used for soft drinks and water are made from polyethylene terephthalate (Pet), which is highly recyclable. But as their use soars across the globe, efforts to collect and recycle the bottles to keep them from polluting the oceans, are failing to keep up.
That's great you can recycle them. Just like aluminum cans there's no reason not to do it. Of course the problem is made to seem that no one does, but clearly people do recycle. Hence the scare quotes, large numbers, and references like halfway to the sun. 500 billion bottles sounds large but that's less than 100 per person per year. Or one every three days. Few people are going to think that's a problem.
So educate people to recycle and stop saying stupid shit like it's worse that climate change.
This sounds like a lot, but in reality it is a small fraction of the oil used per hour by humanity. The average weight of a PET drink bottle is 12.7grams, so a million bottles a minute is about 12.7 metric tonnes of plastic a minute. Assuming 100% conversion efficiency from crude into PET (ie other distillates are utilised for other purposes) that is about 90 barrels a minute or 129600 barrels a day.
World crude oil usage is about 100 million barrels a day. So plastic bottles are about 0.13% of daily oil consumption. Even if we stopped using them altogether, the impact would be trivial. Also, many countries burn plastic waste to generate energy, so removing bottles as fuel will potentially cause an equivalent increase in other fossil fuel usage.
I'm not saying we shouldn't help the environment. Just pointing out that this is not going to be a panacea.
There are two problems with this. One is that even a thin layer of leaves will keep the plastic bottle safe from UV. The other is that most plastics are made with toxics, they don't magically disappear when they break down in the sunlight.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Unfortunately, you're the one full of BS. While they might break down with direct exposure to the sun, they do so very slowly, more slowly than you have observed. As they break down they release toxins that never even existed until this material was created into the environment and food chain. It also gets broken down into small bits and pieces that small lifeforms end up consuming. Small fish and even smaller organisms, eat this crap, then larger organisms eat them and so forth. You know, like how mercury builds up going up the food chain. Eating a contaminated shrimp isn't as bad as eating a contaminated tuna which has eaten 100s of pounds of those contaminated shrimp.
No, it doesn't all revert back to good 'ol mother earth, it sits in our environment in ever more microscopic forms for 100s or 1000s of years. The first plastic ever created is still with us. The leaves that fell off the trees last year are completely gone and have returned back to mother earthy. We will be fucked by plastic created today long after our great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grand have died, if Earth even makes it that far.