Plastic wasn’t invented until the late 19th century, and production really only took off around 1950, we have 9.2 billion tons of plastic to deal with. Of that, more than 6.9 billion tons have become waste. And of that waste, a staggering 6.3 billion tons never made it to a recycling facility—a figure that stunned the scientists who crunched the numbers in 2017.
