A new study finds that every year people create 57 million tons of plastic pollution. The material winds up everywhere from the deepest oceans to the highest peak of Mount Everest to inside people's body.

The world creates 57 million tons of plastic pollution every year and spreads it from the deepest oceans to the highest mountaintop to the inside of people’s bodies, according to a new study that also said more than two-thirds of it comes from the Global South.

It’s enough pollution each year — about 52 million metric tons — to fill New York City’s Central Park with plastic waste as high as the Empire State Building, according to researchers at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom. They examined waste produced on the local level at more than 50,000 cities and towns across the world for a study in Wednesday’s journal Nature.

The study examined plastic that goes into the open environment, not plastic that goes into landfills or is properly burned. For 15% of the world’s population, government fails to collect and dispose of waste, the study’s authors said — a big reason Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa produce the most plastic waste. That includes 255 million people in India, the study said.

  • genuine@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    Actually the world isn’t doing anything, the infestation called humanity is doing most of the bad shit going on.

    If we just stop the world will return to normal and balance out but for that we need a proper plague…

  • NeuronautML@lemmy.mlEnglish
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    4 months ago

    Plastics are becoming endemic at this point. There are bacteria evolving to live in and consume plastic already. I wonder how our bodies are beginning to change to cope with this.

    • EddoWagt@feddit.nlEnglish
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      4 months ago

      They don’t, bacteria can evolve quickly because they multiply a lot. Humans take about 30 years to create offspring so evolution is pretty much nonexistent on the scale of a human life

      • NeuronautML@lemmy.mlEnglish
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        4 months ago

        Yeah i didn’t necessarily mean our DNA, more like our internal fauna, in particular our gut fauna, which has tremendous implications over how our body functions, influencing our brains, metabolism and immune system.

        If bacteria are changing and our bodies are about a one to one ratio of human cell to bacteria cells according to recent studies, it follows that bacteria changing does not preclude us from changing as well, since not only are bacteria a part of us, we fundamentally depend on bacteria to be alive. We cannot ever be separated from the evolution of bacteria.

        So while our own DNA will not change significantly in such a timescale, that doesn’t mean our internal metabolism processes will not change somehow, i would wager. Not only us, but all the animals around us that we eat and live with as well. It’s interesting to think, for instance, of vitamins we don’t produce but still need and we take from bacteria living inside us. I wonder if similar bacteria would, for instance, evolve to decompose plastics in our bodies or such like.

        • EddoWagt@feddit.nlEnglish
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          4 months ago

          That’s actually an interesting thought, I’m not sure if that all happens quickly enough to be noticeable within a human lifespan, but it will be interesting to see I suppose. Only time will tell

      • girlfreddy@lemmy.caOPEnglish
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        4 months ago

        Yup. Just like the wolves at Chernobyl are evolving to be immune to cancer, but their lifespans are far less than ours. Evolution in humans happens, but it takes a whole lot longer.

  • girlfreddy@lemmy.caOPEnglish
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    4 months ago

    Honestly I wish journalists would quit blaming ‘the world’ for stuff like this. It’s not ‘the world’ making all the plastic … it’s big oil and big companies that are.

    • Mr_Blott@feddit.ukEnglish
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      4 months ago

      You vote with your wallet. The Give-me-convenience-or-give-me-death cunts leave a trail of disposable contact lenses, toothpicks, dental floss sticks and single use kid’s toys all around the beautiful European mountain area I live in.

      It’s just pure fucking selfishness and it’s getting worse

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
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        4 months ago

        You vote with your wallet.

        I checked my credit card statement and I can’t find “57 million tons of plastic” anywhere on it.

        Meanwhile, I’m walking through literally any store anywhere, and it seems like every conceivable piece of commercial merchandise is trapped in a six-inch thick plastic clam shell. Like, you routinely get more packaging than product. I’m not asking for this. I don’t want to purchase it. But I’m told that anything not embedded in a plastic Ft. Knox has a 0.2% higher chance of being shoplifted, so I just need to accept this as a consequence of people voting without their wallets.

      • Dkarma@lemmy.worldEnglish
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        4 months ago

        You vote for the only options u have. Everyone is making this shit. No one is making bio plastics. You don’t have the option to not buy a lot of the plastics you consume.

        • Mr_Blott@feddit.ukEnglish
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          4 months ago

          You have the option NOT to use anything I mentioned, but people do because of the “One snowflake never felt responsible for an avalanche” effect

        • girlfreddy@lemmy.caOPEnglish
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          4 months ago

          Yup. A while back I remember reading that Germany had a system in place that rated manufacturers’ packaging based on recycling - the more unrecyclable/mixed media the packaging was, the higher the import fees/sale taxes…

          Dunno if it’s still like that, but it seems the most logical way to place the costs of plastic pollution where it belongs … on the manufacturers.