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Of the 30 billion plastic bottles used by UK households each year, only 57% are currently recycled.
With half of these in landfills, half of all recycled plastic bottles are wasted.
Around 700,000 plastic bottles a day end up as garbage.
This is largely due to the plastic wrap around the bottles that is not recyclable.
Bottles contribute greatly to the increasing amount of plastic waste in the world’s oceans.
The researchers warned that eight million tons of plastics currently reach the ocean each year, the equivalent of one truckload per minute.
The amount of plastic litter in the world’s oceans will outstrip fish by 2050 unless the world takes drastic steps to recycle even more, a report released in 2016 revealed.
At current rates, this will worsen at four truckloads per minute in 2050 and overtake native life to become the largest mass living in the oceans.
An overwhelming 95 percent of plastic packaging, worth £ 65 – £ 92 billion – is lost to the economy after one use, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation report.
And the available research estimates that there are more than 150 million tons of plastics in the ocean today.
Plastic pollution is ruining the world’s ecosystems, both marine and terrestrial. Covers shorelines, catches animals, and suffocates entire populations of animals
Scientists have warned that so much plastic is dumped into the sea each year that it would fill five transport bags for every foot of the planet’s coastline.
More than half of the plastic waste that flows into the oceans comes from just five countries: China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Sri Lanka.
The only western industrialized country on the top 20 list of plastic polluters is the United States at number 20.
The United States and Europe are not mismanaging their collected waste, so the plastic garbage that comes from those countries is due to garbage, the researchers said.
While China is responsible for 2.4 million tons of plastic reaching the ocean, almost 28 percent of the world total, the United States contributes only 77,000 tons, which is less than one percent, according to the study published in the magazine. Science.
