Plastic pollution and the responsibility of the industry

In 1950, a global population of 2.5 billion produced 1.5 million tons of plastic. In 2016, the world population of 7 billion people produced more than 320 million tons of plastic. Most of it still exists in some form as plastic takes over 400 years to degrade. No wonder plastic pollution can be found on every beach in the world today, from busy tourist beaches to uninhabited. More or less all plastic ending up in our oceans is carried there by just 10 rivers, most of them from overly populated industrial cities. If present trends continue, by 2050 there might be more plastic in the ocean than fish, and the amount of plastic in landfills will be 35 000 times as heavy as the Empire State Building.