

Plastic Pollution
Fact Sheet on Plastic Pollution
"BIG THANKS TO WAYNE YEE MON FOR COMPILING THIS INFORMATION"
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500 million plastic straws are thrown away every day in the US according to 5 Gyres, a global health non-profit. To understand it, that’s 46,400 school buses every year! It is an average of 1.6 straws per person per day. That’s 175 billion a year filtering into landfills and littering our waterways and oceans.​
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Each person will use approximately 38,000 or more plastic straws between the ages of 5 and 65.
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If every person gave up plastic straws for one month, it would help keep nearly 50 straws out of the ocean. [just 50 or 50 million??]
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​US consumption of plastic straws can wrap around the earth’s circumference 2.5 times A DAY.
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Per year, the world uses over 1 billion plastic straws and 5 trillion plastics are used.
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Plastic litter from take out orders is a prime source of the estimated 269,000 tons of plastic pollution that is swept into the waterways and oceans. Ocean-bound plastic pollution is approximately 8 million tons per year
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Plastics are not bio-degradable, they just break into smaller and smaller pieces called micro-plastics.
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RESOURCES
Movies
Plastic: A Toxic Love Story by Susan Freinkel and Zero Waste Home by Bea Johnson
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Books
Plastic: A Toxic Love Story by Susan Freinkel and
Zero Waste Home by Bea Johnson​
Website
Publication
Pollutants in plastics within the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre (Environmental Science & Technology 2018)