Fewer PET bottles are needed, and individuals and environmentally conscious businesses could do more for the Earth. If there is no change, then by 2050 there will be more plastic garbage on our planet than the number of fish swimming in our waters, Economx writes in its article.
Diána Ürge-Vorsatz, the vice-president of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, repeatedly drew attention to the health-damaging effects of microplastics in her presentations:
- Today, microplastics can also be found in the human placenta, so newborns are born with it.
- is also responsible for the decline of male fertility,
- and when it gets into the brain, for example, for Parkinson’s disease.
From synthetic fiber clothes, for example, extremely large amounts of microplastics enter our waters and nature. With just one wash, we send 2-4 million microparticles per kilo of clothes into the sewage system.
Diána Ürge-Vorsatz said that the microplastic is not visible to the naked eye and does not decompose, it only falls apart into pieces smaller than 5 millimeters due to physical and chemical effects. It is a disturbing fact that by the turn of the millennium there were three times more artificial material than natural material in the world.
Many people would not think so, but after soaking the popular plastic tea filters, billions of microplastic particles get into our drink, which we then swallow. But microplastics can already be detected in the air, which of course we inhale.
There is more and more waste in Hungary
More than one billion PET bottles are sold annually in Hungary alone, Economx highlighted. According to the newspaper, we have gone back six years, because the amount of waste per capita in Hungary is on average 416 kilograms, essentially since 2016 we have not been able to improve in this either.
In terms of the annual energy-utilized municipal waste, we are more than 80 kilograms behind the EU average, while the “bring back the bottle” period is knocking. They also listed a few disturbing numbers about the rise of plastics:
- 8 million tons of plastic end up in the oceans every year.
- There is more microplastic in the oceans than there are stars in the Milky Way.
- If the rate of plastic production does not decrease, then by 2050 the weight of plastic waste will weigh more than the weight of fish.
It was emphasized that the According to Greenpeace, the primary goal is to limit plastic production. In the document jointly accepted by the member states, it was previously stated that “sustainable production” is necessary, which, according to leading scientists, means a significant reduction in the volume of global plastic production.
