It is everywhere because it's almost endlessly useful. And when it's thrown away, if plastic finds its way into a plant like this, a lot of it can be made into something useful all over again.

 

塑料无处不在，因为它的用途几乎是无穷无尽的。当塑料被丢弃后，如果被运到了像这样的废物处理厂，大量的塑料垃圾就可以被重新制成有用的东西。

 

But every year more and more plastic waste ends up here. And a global team of scientists has now tracked the production and disposal of plastic all around the world and used that information to forecast the scale of our plastic pollution problem for the next 20 years.

 

If you were to count all together all the plastic waste that is going to be released into the environment both on land and reaching the seas, these would be the staggering¹ number of 1.3 billion tonnes of plastic.

 

1.3 billion tonnes is so big of a number it's almost unimaginable. How can you even visualise how much waste that is?

 

If you were to spread these on a thin layer of land, it would be 1.5 times the size of the UK.

 

Household waste, the scientists say, is by far the biggest source of all this pollution. They calculated that every year 30 million tonnes is dumped on land; nearly 50 million tonnes is burned out in the open, and that's in addition to the 10 million tonnes that finds its way into our oceans.

 

Many of us might do our bit with reusable water bottles and coffee cups. But there's an estimated two billion people in the global south who have no access to any formal waste collection - they're simply left to work out what to do with all their rubbish.

 

Providing protection and safe employment for workers in low-income countries who collect and sort all of that waste will be just as important globally as reducing the production of single-use plastic. And while these new figures are daunting², the researchers say that recognising the source and the scale of this problem is the first step in stemming³ the worldwide tide of plastic pollution.

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