Question: yes, it does thank you :) but how many plastics are there? and what made you deside to study plastics?

Nicolas Biber answered on 17 Jun 2011:

Hey charlie81

We now produce between 250 and 300 million tonnes of plastic every year. It was only about 30 million tonnes in the 80s. I have never tried to do the maths about how much plastic remains on earth, but it must be in the billions of tonnes, that’s really hard to imagine. The amount of plastic that gets into the ocean every year I estimate to about 2-5 million tonnes. Also this keeps adding up, because plastic in the environment never really disappears. It’s probably safe to say that there are dozens of million tonnes of plastic in the ocean.
As for what made me decide to study plastic: I was brought up to never throw rubbish on the floor, and I never do. Also I get upset when people do, because I realized very early that once it’s there, plastic would never disappear, and I don’t like that idea. Then one of my professors at university told us something about microplastics, how plastic degrades into really small bits, and that I found really scary. So I decided to do something about it and extend our knowledge on this problem. And here I am 🙂