Many of us will have seen the stark images of plastic in the ocean: bottles and wrappers clumped together, or rubbish trapped along the coastline. But how much of the world\u2019s plastic waste ends up in the ocean?<\/p>\n
In 2020, Gapminder asked people in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and the UK this question. They had three options to choose from:<\/p>\n
A) Less than 1%B) Less than 36%C) Less than 66%<\/p>\n
Almost nine in ten people picked B or C, thinking it was more than one-third.<\/p>\n
The correct answer was A: around 0.5% of plastic waste ends up in the ocean.<\/p>\n
The chart shows how the OECD gets to this number. Globally, we produce around 350 million tonnes of plastic waste a year. Most of this is managed responsibly, either in secure landfills, through recycling, or incineration. But around one-quarter of it is mismanaged or littered.<\/p>\n
From there, a decreasing fraction of plastic waste leaks to the environment, then into rivers and coastlines, and finally into the ocean. Around 1.7 million tonnes end up there: around 0.5% of what was generated in the first place.<\/p>\n
People tend to think that most of our plastic ends up there, but only a tiny percentage does. This should make plastic pollution an easier problem to solve: we already know how to manage most of it well. The challenge is to ensure that all plastic is handled this way.<\/p>\n
Read my article, which looks at this question in more detail<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Many of us will have seen the stark images of plastic in the ocean: bottles and wrappers clumped…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":806469,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-806468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=806468"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806468\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/806469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=806468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=806468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=806468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}