Plastic becoming threat for mother earth

Over 1,000,000 seabirds and marine mammals die each year from plastic ingestion of entanglement 

• Over the last ten years we have produced more plastic than during the whole of the last century.
• 50 percent of the plastic we use, we use just once and throw away.
• Enough plastic is thrown away each year tocircle the earth four TIME.
• 380 billion plastic bags are used in the World every year. That’s more than 1,200 bags per resident, per year.
• 100 billion of the 380 billion are plastic shopping bags.
• Plastic bags are often mistakenly ingested by animals, clogging their intestines which results in death by starvation. Other animals or birds become entangled in plastic bags and drown or can’t fly as a result.
• About 60 to 100 million barrels of oil are required every year for plastic bags.
• Plastic production requires hundreds of thousands of gallons of water as well as toxic chemicals like sulphurous acid, which can lead to acid rain and water pollution.
• Thousands of marine animals and more than 1 million birds die each year as a result of plastic pollution.
• Chemicals commonly used by the plastic industry [propylene, phenol, ethylene, polystyrene, and benzene] are ranked as the chemicals that generate the most hazardous waste.
• The United Nations Environment Program estimates that there are 46,000 pieces of plastic litter floating in every square mile of ocean.
• A single plastic bag can take up to 1,000 years to degrade.
• Plastic bags are the second-most common type of ocean refuse, after cigarette butts.

image source:www.sonomacountyairport.org