Plastic waste by the numbers
Source: https://www.earthday.org/america-recycles-day-is-plastic-recycling-the-solution-you-think-it-is/
The amount of material processed by municipal waste services is unimaginably large. Annually, the average American discards about 487 pounds of plastic. For households and small businesses, individual impacts are fairly inconsequential. However, the combined plastic waste from households and industrial processes combined is 35.7 million tons according to EPA data from 2018. Alright, so we generate a lot of plastic waste, so what’s the problem if we’re able to recycle it all? The issue with plastic recycling is that unprocessed plastic still makes its way into landfills. The same EPA dataset states that 27 million tons of plastic was received by landfills in 2018, which was 18.5 percent of the total waste. This plastic remains in landfills for up to 450 years, releasing microplastics into groundwater reservoirs as it degrades all the while. With such a large percentage of plastic waste ending up in landfills, it can be easy to point at recycling as the simple answer to all problems. However, there are many issues dealing with corporate plastic waste that make the issue more complicated than that.