New research helps unravel how vast amounts of plastic particles travel

The numbers here are so staggering, I thought they had to be wrong. How many plastic bottles can humans possibly throw away in total?

How wrong my assumption seems to be. In 2017, we created over 1 million plastic bottles a minute [0], and in 2018 we produced more plastic by weight[1] than the human population of the world[2].

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2017/07/26/million-p...

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/282732/global-production...

[2] https://www.livescience.com/36470-human-population-weight.ht....

We also need to consider the microplastics turning into nanoplastics. At that scale they can cross cell membranes. We still don't know what that means: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41565-019-0437-7

From here [1]

> Most of these plastic particles are synthetic microfibers used for making clothing

How do I buy clothes that don't have synthetic microfibers? What do I look for on the tag?

[1] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6496/1257

> The scientists found microplastics in almost every sample they collected. In total, 4 percent of the identifiable dust particles were plastic. Brahney and her colleagues “immediately realized the gravity of what we were seeing,” she says. “That was a moment of being just completely astounded.”

As costal erosion becomes a bigger problem, I wonder if there will be a lot more geo-textiles used on the coast line to manage it. Textiles made of plastic that will eventually just wash into the oceans. Where I live on the Sea of Japan I am constantly finding all kinds of things washed up from China, Korea and Russia (along with all the fishing gear). There is very little I could do locally to clean up the beaches here.

As the great George has said, humanity is here just to create deposits of plastic on the planet.