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ARTICLE AD BOX
A new Pew model tracking 52 plastics and seven microplastic sources shows the crisis accelerating, with health and climate harms rising fast. It provides four interventions — reducing virgin plastic, redesigning materials, scaling reuse and boosting transparency — could reverse the trend
On beaches, salt pans, riverbanks, farmland and even in the deep ocean, plastic is now everywhere. Designed for durability, it shows up in sediment layers, coral reefs, polar ice and in microscopic fragments inside human bodies.
Despite decades of scientific evidence, global plastic production continues to rise sharply and new data suggests the full scale of the crisis is only now coming into view.
A new study, Breaking the Plastic Wave 2025, by The Pew Charitable Trusts and ICF International, projects that annual plastic pollution could exceed 280 million metric tonnes by 2040, roughly a dump truck’s worth entering the environment every second.
Today, less than 10% of the world’s plastic is recycled, and over 140 million tonnes leak into the environment every year.
English (US) ·