Climate Conversations Podcast: Are we slowing down our plastic addiction?

It’s been a year since supermarkets in Singapore have stopped giving out free plastic bags. Has that created a dent in our consumption of plastics? Jack Board and Liling Tan wrap their heads around the plastic conundrum.

Here's an excerpt from the podcast:

Jack Board: 
How much plastic do you think the world is actually producing every year? In 1950, it was about 2000 tonnes. But by 2020, we'd reached more than 400 million tonnes in that year. And what about the trajectory? By 2050, by some estimates, the world could be creating 1.1 billion tonnes annually - crazy numbers. 

Liling Tan:
It's durable, it's versatile, it's cheap. The problem though, is that it lasts basically forever, or at least generations and generations. It takes a plastic bottle about 450 years to break down, meaning every plastic bottle ever made is still out there if it hasn't been incinerated or turned into something else. Now, the gravity of what we've made as a modern civilisation is pretty hard to comprehend, isn't it? 

Jack:
It is, and the fact that it just keeps growing and growing. The numbers, the estimates, are that there are more than 6 billion tonnes of discarded plastic out there in the environment, and producing all of this plastic as well causes a lot of carbon emissions too.