Scientists used A.I. to model local waste management in 50,000 municipalities worldwide and say the results suggest a need to improve access to waste collection systems

If you organized the plastic pollution that entered the environment in 2020 in a line, it could circle the Earth more than 1,500 times. Simply dumped into a pile, the refuse would fill up New York City’s Central Park in a layer as high as the Empire State Building.

Put another way, that’s about 57 million tons (52 million metric tons) of plastic waste that was not properly disposed of—and pieces of it could now be floating in the ocean, sitting at the top of a mountain or even infiltrating your bloodstream. In a new study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, scientists tallied these numbers, creating the first-ever global plastics pollution inventory.

  • @CorneliusTalmadge
    1•14 days ago

    57 million tons is equal to 114 billion pounds. According to this Wikipedia page the average adult in North American weighs 180lbs.

    114,000,000,000 lbs / 180 lbs/person = 633,333,333 people

    So it’s an amount of plastic that weighs as much as 633 million people; of course it is still impossible to really imagine how much plastic that is. But maybe a better reference then the volume a park.