Question: How much has plastic rubbish increased over the last few years?

Nicolas Biber answered on 21 Jun 2011:

Hey berrylover 🙂

We don’t have exact numbers about how much plastics are discarded every year, but it’s safe to say that several million tonnes are dumped into the ocean per year now. Plastic production has increased from about thirty million tonnes in the 1980s to about three hundred million tonnes in 2010. Probably the amount discarded has increased at the same rate. Of course this is only the amount that is discarded every year. This adds to the amount that is already there, because plastic never really disappears. So you could say that the amount of rubbish has increased by two to three hundred million tonnes per year over the last few years.