Forecast of Plastic Pollution

　　PARIS(AFP): Global plastic waste in a world severely blighted by plastic pollution is set to almost triple by 2060, with around half ending up in landfills and less than a fifth recycled, according to a new report.

　　Annual production of fossil-fuel-based plastics is set to top 1.2 billion tons by 2060 and waste to exceed 1 billion tons, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development(OECD).

　　There is increasing international alarm over the volume and omnipresence of plastics pollution, and its impact. Infiltrating the most remote and otherwise pristine regions of the planet, microplastics have been discovered inside fish in the deepest recesses of the ocean and locked inside Arctic ice. The debris is estimated to cause the deaths of more than a million seabirds and over 100,000 marine mammals each year.“ Plastic pollution is one of the great environmental challenges of the 21st century, causing wide-ranging damage to ecosystems and human health,” OECD chief Mathias Cormann said. Since the 1950s, roughly 8.3 billion tons of plastic have been produced with more than 60%of that tossed into landfills, burned, or dumped directly into rivers and oceans.

　　Some 460 million tons of plastics were used in 2019, twice as much as 20 years earlier. The amount of plastic waste has also nearly doubled, exceeding 350 million tons, with less than 10%of it recycled. On current trends, the use of plastics is projected to roughly double in North America, Europe, and East Asia. In other emerging and developing countries, it is expected to grow three to five-fold, and more than six-fold in sub-Saharan Africa.