Plastics to outweigh fish in the sea by 2050

click to enlarge

The report, The New Plastics Economy: Rethinking the future of plastics, was launched at the 2016 World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday, 20 January.

Key findings

Ellen MacArthur, founder of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, as part of a panel briefing on the topic, explained some of the key findings from the report.

"There's obviously the stats around what's leaking out of the system. We discovered that when you look at plastics as a whole, which is 300 million tonnes a year, 78 million tonnes of that is plastic packaging. Of that only 14% is recovered for recycling globally, only 10% is recycled, and because of the constitution of the plastic and cross-contamination, only 5% of the value of that plastic is actually recovered," she explained.

According to MacArthur, vast amounts of plastic is lost to the economy: 40% is in landfills and 14% is incinerated.

"Every single piece of plastic that's been made over the last say 70 years since we started using it at speed, every single piece exists unless we've incinerated it, and that means that the 32% leakage we have out of the system every year ends up in the environment, ends up in rivers, it ends up in the sea, which is how we came to the stats around the amount of plastic in the sea."

Looking at opportunities to deal with the complex problem, the report finds that the solution has to be a multi-stakeholder one.

© Narcis Parfenti – 123RF.com

The report was produced with analytical support from McKinsey & Company, as part of Project MainStream, a global, multi-industry initiative that aims to accelerate business-driven innovations to help scale the circular economy. It was financially supported by the MAVA Foundation.

Read the full report.