27.09.2020

1 Million Plastic Bottles Bought Every Minute, That's Nearly 20,000 Every Second

​Citing figures from consumer market research company Euromonitor International, The Guardian reported that 1 million plastic bottles are bought every minute—or about 20,000 per second—around the globe. About 540 billion plastic bottles were purchased globally in 2019 but less than half gets recycled, meaning most of this waste ends up in our oceans and landfills. Even worse, the report notes that the world's increasing thirst for bottled beverages, especially in economically growing Asian countries, will bump these figures up another 20 percent, or 583.3 billion bottles, by 2021—fueling a crisis that experts believe will be as serious as climate change. The life-cycle of a plastic bottle is environmentally problematic from the very beginning. Plastic bottles are made out of PET, or polyethylene terephthalate, a resin derived from petroleum and natural gas. These fossil fuels are heated up and mixed with water to create plastic. A typical one-liter plastic bottle uses about two liters of water during this process – so a one-liter bottle of water represents three liters of water consumption. Each of those bottles takes about 4 million joules of energy to create, and every ton of this plastic that is produced creates three tons of CO2. Landfills aren’t the only place that our waste is ending up. 8 million tons of plastic ends up in the ocean annually, and that number is steadily increasing – it just about doubles every 10 years. Credit: WASTE ED