美国国家公共电台 NPR Plastic Is Everywhere And Recycling Isn't The End Of It

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DAVID GREENE, HOST:

Few inventions in modern history have been as successful as plastic. It's in vehicles, building materials, most of our electronic devices. We wrap stuff in it. Maybe we even wear it. Now a research team has tallied¹ up how much plastic has been produced and where much of it has gone. NPR's Christopher Joyce reports that plastic is almost everywhere.

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CHRISTOPHER JOYCE, BYLINE²: It seems no one, up till now, has actually tallied how much plastic people have manufactured since its invention. Roland Geyer, an industrial ecologist, decided³ to do that. He was shocked.

ROLAND GEYER: 8.3 billion metric tons of plastics produced so far - that's just really an staggering amount.

JOYCE: Geyer, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, did some calculations.

GEYER: And it turned out it can cover an area the size of Argentina, which is the eighth-largest country in the world.

JOYCE: Ankle-deep. So is that a problem? Well, almost all plastics don't degrade.

GEYER: They will be with us for hundreds of years.

JOYCE: Much of it in the soil or in the ocean or our water. Plastic is, of course, very useful. Geyer and his colleagues found that 42 percent of plastic goes for packaging. The second-largest use is for construction, at about 20 percent. Plastic fibers⁴, like polyester, is one of the fastest-growing uses.

But eventually, most of it gets thrown away. In the U.S., three quarters of discarded plastic ends up in landfills or is just lost. The rest is incinerated or recycled. Geyer says recycling helps but usually just delays its inevitable⁵ disposal.

Writing in the journal Science Advances, Geyer notes that plastic production has grown 8 percent a year for decades. He says that outpaces any other manufactured material and shows no sign of slowing down because it's so useful.

GEYER: It is a fantastic material.

JOYCE: But one that we seem to be using to wrap the entire world.

GEYER: I sort of think of it as a giant experiment that we are conducting here on the planet. And no one really knows the outcome.

JOYCE: Christopher Joyce, NPR News.

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