The cost of convenience

_{|  Story by Meghan McMahon |}

_4/21/2025

How much plastic have you used today? Unless you’re very conscious about your plastic consumption, the answer is probably not zero.

Most of us use plastic every day without giving it a second thought, and who can blame us? Plastic is cheap, it’s convenient and it’s everywhere. And that’s the problem. Plastic has revolutionized the world and, as a result, we are using more of it now than ever before.

Plastic began being mass produced in 1952, and since that time annual production has increased almost 200-fold, Earth.org reports. Today, humans generate about 400 million tons of plastic every year. The U.S. alone produces 42 million metric tons of plastic — more than any other country on Earth. The United States produces more plastic than all the countries in the European Union combined and produces nearly twice as much as China.

As plastic production has grown, so, too, has the production of single-use plastics. In fact, 50% of all the plastic produced today is for single-use products, according to the United Nations.

What are single-use plastics?

Single-use plastics are plastic products that are designed to be used once and tossed. Think about how you might use these items in your daily life. Did you get plastic cutlery with your last take-out order? Grab a plastic water bottle for your latest workout? Pack your kids’ lunch using plastic sandwich bags?

These are just a few examples of how single-use plastics are prevalent in our everyday lives. When you multiply their use by the hundreds of millions of people in the United States and billions of people in the world, the numbers can be staggering. Consider these astonishing statistics:

• 1 million plastic drinking bottles are purchased every minute across the world.
• Americans throw away about 25 billion Styrofoam coffee cups every year.
• The world uses 5 trillion plastic bags each year.

Not all single-use plastics are bad. In medical settings, gloves and other single-use plastic items are designed to make us safer and prevent the spread of infections and other complications. However, the huge increase in production of single-use plastics has created consequences we are only beginning to understand.

Where do they all go?

What happens to all the plastic straws, food wrappers, drink bottles, coffee cups and more once we are done with them? Some of it is incinerated, and a lot of it ends up taking up space in our landfills, where it will languish indefinitely because plastic does not decompose. In fact, 85% of single-use plastics end up in landfills or as unregulated waste, according to the United Nations Environment Program.

Some of those trillions of plastic pieces are recycled, but only a small amount. Only 10% of all the plastic ever produced has been recycled, and single-use plastics pose specific challenges as far as recycling is concerned. Many of these one-and-done items like straws, bags, wrappers and cutlery are small and lightweight — too small and lightweight to be captured by the machinery utilized in recycling centers, the Natural Resources Defense Council reports. In fact, many recycling facilities do not even include single-use plastics among their accepted items.

Millions of plastic pieces end up in our oceans every year as well. Even a plastic bottle that blows out of the back of a recycling truck driving down the interstate here in Will County can eventually wind its way to the Atlantic Ocean. How? Think about that plastic bottle that bounces out of the back of a recycling truck. Wind might eventually blow it into a creek, and from there it could then make its way to, say, the Kankakee River. Eventually, all our local rivers flower into the Mississippi River, and from there it can be carried down to the Gulf of Mexico.

It's a story as old as time, or at least as old as plastic. Untold numbers of plastic items end up in our oceans. It’s a hard figure to quantify, but estimates show about 8 million metric tons of plastic enter our oceans every year, according to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. 

Pervasive plastics

Oceans and landfills aren’t the only places plastic winds up. More than you might be comfortable with also ends up in our bodies. The plastic in our bodies is in the form of microplastics — tiny plastic particles measuring less than 5 millimeters in diameter.

Some microplastics are in products that utilize these small particles. This can include plastics in cosmetic and hygiene products as well as fibers in clothing, National Geographic reports. There’s another kind of microplastics, though, that results from the breakdown of the billions of plastic products that are a part of our daily lives.

Remember: Plastic doesn’t decompose, at least not quickly. If it does, it will take hundreds or even thousands of years. What plastic does do is degrade. When it’s exposed to environmental conditions like sunlight and waves, plastic breaks down to smaller and ever smaller pieces — microplastics.

All those tiny plastic particles are everywhere. They’re in the oceans and other waterways, they’re on beaches, they’re even circulating in the air. Eventually they make their way into our food supply and drinking water, the United Nations reports.

Research into the effects these microplastics can have on human health is just beginning, but it can lead to changes in respiration rates, brain development and even human genetics, according to the UN.

What can you do?

The problems caused by single-use plastics have grown right alongside the increase in production of plastic, and they aren’t problems that can be solved without coordinated global efforts. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t take steps to lessen the impact.

Put simply, if you want to reduce the amount of single-use plastics taking up space in the world — be it in landfills or in our ecosystems — you need to use less of it. Here are a few simple steps you can take, courtesy of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency:

• Purchase reuseable water bottles for your entire family instead of using plastic beverage bottles for water, sports drinks, coffee and more.
• Keep a few reusable shopping bags in your car to use for grocery shopping and errands.
• Pack your meals and snacks in reusable containers rather than single-use ones. Even better: Purchase glass reusable containers instead of plastic.
• Don’t eat on plastic plates or with plastic cutlery at home.
• Skip the straw at restaurants and drink from the glass instead.
• When you do buy plastic products, look for products made from recycled plastic.

_{(Photos via Shutterstock)}