2018 Statistic of the Year: 90.5 Percent of Plastic Waste Has Never Been Recycled (bbc.com)

Two of 2018's best statistics from the Royal Statistical Society are about the environment. "The winning international statistic of the year was 90.5% -- the proportion of plastic waste that has never been recycled," reports the BBC. "And in the UK category, the top stat was 27.8% -- the highest percentage of all electricity which was generated by solar power." From the report: A panel of judges picked the two winners, along with several highly commended statistics, from more than 200 nominations. Entries for 2018 were submitted earlier this year. Judges on the panel included Dame Jil Matheson, former national statistician -- the top adviser to the government on official statistics, as well as RSS president Sir David Spiegelhalter, BBC home editor Mark Easton and the Guardian's U.S. data editor Mona Chalabi.

The environment and plastic waste has repeatedly made headlines in 2018, and "single-use" -- referring to plastic waste -- was named the word of the year. Other highly commended statistics include:

$1.3 billion: the amount lost from the value of Snapchat within a day after Kylie Jenner tweeted: "Sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore?"
85.9%: the proportion of British trains that ran on time -- the lowest for more than a decade
40%: the percentage of Russian men who do not live to the age of 65
64,946: the number of measles cases in Europe from November 2017 to October 2018
82%: the percentage of all British retail shopping that is still in-store rather than online
16.7%: the percentage reduction of the number of Jaffa Cakes in the McVities' Christmas tube
6.4%: the percentage of female executive directors within FTSE 250 companies

Comments

Negativity bias much? How about the good news?

[Wrath0fb0b]

There's an interesting quirk in human psychology that makes negative facts and news seem more salient than positive ones. For media that thrives on reader attention (and that's both new and old media), this naturally leads to more emphasis on the negative.

I think this is a bias worth noting and pushing back on. The world is pretty far from perfect, but there's also huge helpings of good news all around us.

• Continuing the trend, nearly 70M people in dire poverty gain access to electricity
• Extreme global poverty continues its decline, although it's getting harder to make progress on that front
• The US death rate from cancer continues its steady yearly drop. Cumulatively, this has prevented hundreds of thousands of deaths
• The pack of criminals who made a wholesale business of taking sex slaves in war lost their last city
• The world continues its steady march towards universal literacy. You can't embed pictures in /. (for reaaaalllly goatse reasons) but the figures here are really striking
• The Long Peace continues for another year, meaning millions of lives impacted
• Cigarette smoking, a leading cause of totally preventable death, fell to its lowest rate in the US
• Automobile deaths per vehicle mile continued to drop

Most of these (Daesh not withstanding, but threw them in just because they were really vile) follow the same pattern: slow but steady progress. It's hardly clickbait -- in fact these are not even specific events you can point to, they are trends seen on the scale of decades. And on the scale of decades, the world is consistently becoming a less-bad place.

Re:I get it...

[Solandri]

But isn't the BULK of ocean plastic waste pollution (90%+) coming from 10 rivers? (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plastic-tide-10-rivers-contribute-most-of-the-plastic-in-the-oceans/)

If you read the article you've linked carefully, those 10 rivers account for 93% of the plastic waste entering the oceans from rivers. But they only account for ~25% of all plastic waste entering the oceans. About 73% comes from sources other than rivers if I did my math right.

A recent study estimates that more than a quarter of all that waste could be pouring in from just 10 rivers, eight of them in Asia.

Re:I get it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Then this article will set everyone straight. American produces 0.9% of all mismanaged plastic waste entering oceans. Cites are provided within the article.

https://www.earthday.org/2018/04/06/top-20-countries-ranked-by-mass-of-mismanaged-plastic-waste/

The 19 countries that produce more waste account for 82.2% of all mismanaged plastic waste entering oceans. Almost all of those 19 countries have an access point to those 10 rivers.

How does that strike you?