The scale of plastic pollution is so terrifying, I mostly try to avoid thinking about it, but some facts stop me in my tracks. According to the UN Foundation, there is already enough plastic in the oceans to fill 5m shipping containers – and if production continues at its current rate, by the middle of this century there will be more plastic in the sea than fish. It is also indestructible – all the plastic ever made is still here, decomposing into microplastics that contaminate every corner of the planet – including our bodies. And it’s not just a case of somehow finding a way to “clean it up”. “Plastic pollution is now altering some major processes at the scale of the entire Earth system,” the Stockholm Resilience Centre reported, chillingly, in November.
In the UK alone, our plastic waste problem is mindblowing: in its 2024 Big Plastic Count, Everyday Plastic got almost 225,000 people to count their plastic waste for a week; the final tally was over 4.6m pieces.
