Plastics, an ideal material for the packaging industry, has become a major environmental concern. Today, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is celebrating World Environment Day, urging people to reduce single-use plastic products.
Concerned about the piling plastic waste threatening marine and human life, the UNEP decided to hold the celebrations under the theme of beating plastic pollution. “Our world is swamped by harmful plastic waste. Every year, more than eight million tons end up in the oceans,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said on Tuesday.
According to a study by the University of California and Santa Barbara, researchers estimated that 8,300 million tons of virgin plastics were produced from 1990 to 2015, of which 6,300 tons of plastic waste was generated. Only nine percent of this waste was recycled.
Nearly 12 percent of this waste was incinerated, and 79 percent is piling up in landfills or littering the natural environment. Today, around 300 million tons of plastic are manufactured annually, but only less than 14 percent of the total amount gets recycled.
A vast amount of non-recycled plastic often ends up in rivers or dumped into the ocean. A study published in the science journal Environmental Science and Technology claims that the 10 rivers carry 93 percent of that trash are located in Asia and Africa.
The UNEP is promoting bio-degradable alternatives to plastics, reducing plastic use, and ensuring large-scale recycling of plastic.
“We’ve become over-reliant on single-use or disposable plastic. We buy one million plastic drinking bottles every minute and use roughly 500 billion disposable plastic bags every year,” said Erik Solheim, head of the UNEP.
“In total, some 50 percent of plastic is single-use,” he added.
UNEP first celebrated the Day in 1974 to raise awareness and generate political action around global environmental issues including ozone depletion, desertification, and global warming. India is hosting this year’s environment day.
