We are using about 1 million plastic bottles every minute. Let me emphasize: Every minute. This amounts to 1.3 billion bottles per day, 40 billion bottles per month, 480 billion bottles per year, and 4 trillion bottles over the past decade. These figures are staggering.
Have you ever wondered what it would look like if we piled up all these plastic bottles?
While that image may not exist in real life, thanks to Simon Scarr and Marco Hernandez, two data visualization experts working for Reuters, we can now get a glimpse of it.
Scarr and Hernandez used graphic software to visualize this mountain of plastic bottles next to iconic structures around the world, such as the Christ the Redeemer statue in Brazil and the Eiffel Tower in France, to see how they would be submerged by plastic waste.
And here are the results:
Every year: 480.6 billion stacked plastic bottles would tower far above the Burj Khalifa – the tallest building in the world located in Dubai.
Over the past 50 years, plastic production has surged, leading to the widespread use of cheap, single-use plastic products, significantly impacting the environment.
Among these, polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles are prominently used for containing soft drinks, mineral water, and various personal or household care products.
Data from a study by Science Advances shows that humans produce over 380 million tons of plastic each year. A large portion of that production is molded into 482 billion plastic bottles. In 2018, the number of plastic bottles increased by more than 50% compared to nearly a decade earlier in 2009.
Approximately 55% of plastic waste is simply discarded into the environment untreated, 25% is incinerated, and 20% is recycled. This means that the majority of the bottles depicted above may end their useful life in landfills, buried underground, or floating in the oceans.
In recent decades, the amount of recycled plastic has even declined. Globally, 8.3 billion tons of plastic were produced from 1950 to 2015, of which only a mere 6% was recycled. The majority of the remaining plastic was used once and has now become polluting waste.
However, few of us can truly grasp the severity of these numbers. The project by Scarr and Hernandez can be seen as a beacon to raise awareness about the plastic waste crisis among the public.
It has provided us with a visual representation of our consumption habits regarding plastic, specifically plastic bottles. Every second, the world consumes this many plastic bottles; if they were poured over you, would you be able to survive the deluge?
And here’s another version showing what would happen if the plastic mountain in Manhattan collapsed. It would create a tsunami sweeping through the city:
Finally, if you didn’t know, Hernandez damaged an expensive computer while rendering these images. One of those images took over a week to complete.
It’s truly unimaginable!
