Why your next plastic bottle purchase matters

The world is in a plastic pollution crisis. It has powerful ripple effects through complex, interconnected ecosystems, especially when it comes to the oceans. If left unchecked, “ocean plastic will outweigh all of the ocean’s fish” in the next 30 years. If you’re thinking, that’s a lot of plastic… it is. In the last 70 years, over seven billion tons of plastic waste have accrued. That’s out of nine point two billion tons produced in the first place. The long and short of it? Most of the plastic made ends up as plastic waste.

But it’s not without solutions. For one, if just 10 to 20 percent of the plastic packaging produced today were reused, it could cut the amount of plastic waste entering the ocean in half, according to a report by the World Economic Forum. This is just one effect of what’s called the Circular Plastics Economy. To put it in simple terms, most plastics right now are part of a linear economy. They’re produced as “virgin plastic,” used – sometimes just once – and then recycled or otherwise discarded.

This is where the 7 billion tons above comes in: most of the plastic in a linear economy ends up as waste, but the circular economy is a different story. Once plastic is used, it can be turned into what’s known as PCR plastic: post-consumer recycled plastic. This is one of the things to look out for when you’re purchasing plastics: what percent of PCR plastic does it contain? While it can look identical to a plastic bottle made from virgin plastic, the impact is anything but.