CLEAN FACTS. On plastic pollution

Ever since the pandemic began, plastic waste has gone up by almost 30 per cent in each household. Streets , beaches , and oceans have been hit by a tidal wave of Covid-19 waste including plastic facemasks , gloves, hand sanitiser bottles and food packaging, says UNCTAD .

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Historical

data tell us that about 75 per cent of coronavirus plastic is likely to become waste , clogging our landfills and floating in our seas. A survey cited by The Los Angeles Timesreveals that during an eight-week lockdown , Singapore discarded an additional 1,470 tonnes of plastic waste from takeout packaging and food delivery alone.

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The production of plastic uses around 8 per cent of the world’s oil production . We recover only 5 per cent of the plastics we produce. In fact , it is estimated that over one million plastic bags are used every minute.

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46 per cent of plastics float and can continue to drift on water bodies for years before eventually concentrating in the ocean gyres . The Great Pacific Garbage Patch , located in the North Pacific Gyre off the coast of California, is twice the size of Texas.

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One million sea birds and 100,000 marine mammals are killed annually from the plastic in our oceans.