Sports balls, and plastic bottles and other litter is accumulated by currents in the Tiber River in central Rome. (Credit: REUTERS/Alessandro Bianchi)
Low rates of plastic recycling capture the essence of the times we live in. That’s the conclusion of the Royal Statistical Society which has assessed 2018’s most attention-grabbing stats as part of its annual awards.
The winning statistic of 2018 is that 90.5% of all the plastic that’s ever been produced has never been recycled according to an article on Weforum.org. Mass production of plastic got underway around 60 years ago and since then around 6.3 billion metric tonnes of plastic waste has been generated. Of this, 12% of it is incinerated, with the rest ending up in landfill sites, as litter, or polluting the oceans.
“It’s very concerning that such a large proportion of plastic waste has never been recycled. The really low level of recycling has resulted in far too much waste leaching out into the world’s environment,” says Sir David Spiegelhalter, the chair of the judging panel and Royal Statistical Society president.
