BBC 英语学习 新闻词汇 全球塑料问题

It is

everywhere, because it's almost endlessly useful.

And when it's thrown away, if plastic finds its way into a plant like this, a lot of it can be made into something useful all over again.

But every year, more and more

plastic waste ends up here. And a global team of scientists has now tracked the production and disposal of plastic all around

the world, and use that information to forecast the scale of our plastic pollution problem for the next 20 years.

If you were to count altogether all the plastic ways that is gonna be released into the environment, both on land and reaching the seas, these would be the staggering number of 1.3 billion tons of plastic.

Billion tons is so big of a number it's almost unimaginable.

How can you even visualize how much waste it?

If we were to spread this on a thin layer of land, it would be 1.5 times the size of the UK household waste, the scientists say, is by far the biggest source of all this pollution.

They calculated that every year, 30 million tons is dumped on land, nearly 50 million tons is burned out in the open, and that's in addition to the 10 million tons that finds its way into our oceans.

Many of us might do a bit with reusable water bottles and coffee cups, but there's an estimated 2 billion people in the Global South who have no access to any formal waste collection.

They simply left to work out what to do with all their rubbish, providing protection and safe employment for workers in low income countries who collect and sought all of that waste will be just as important globally as reducing the production of single use plastic.

And while these new figures are daunting, the researchers say that recognizing the source and the scale of this problem is the 1st step in stemming the worldwide tide plastic pollution.

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