1 Million Plastic Bottles Bought Every Minute, That’s Nearly 20,000 Every Second.
A new report highlights the astounding amount of plastic bottles humans go through and the environmental havoc it wreaks.
In the U.S., Americans went through about 50 billion plastic water bottles last year with a dismal 23 percent recycling rate.
A North American study last year found that 22 million pounds of plastic goes into the waters of the Great Lakes each year.
The researchers from Rochester Institute of Technology said that Chicago, Toronto, Cleveland and Detroit are the worst contributors to plastic pollution.
Not only that, researchers from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Australia and Imperial College London found that 99 percent of seabirds will swallow plastic by 2050.
But Annie Leonard, the executive director of Greenpeace USA notes that’s not necessarily true and is a wasteful way to spend our dollars.
"A four-year review of the bottled water industry in the U.S. and the safety standards that govern it, including independent testing of over 1,000 bottles of water found that there is no assurance that just because water comes out of a bottle it is any cleaner or safer than water from the tap.
In fact tap water is tested more frequently than bottled water," Leonard wrote.
"In fact, a lot of the bottled water sold in the U.S. is just treated water from our municipal water systems; the same place our tap water comes from."