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Introduction
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“The global plastic production has mushroomed over the past 70 years. In 1950 the world produced only 2 million tonnes per year. Since then, annual production has increased by nearly 200-fold, reaching 381 million tonnes in 2015. For context, this is roughly equivalent to the mass of two-thirds of the world population”. An estimated 8.3 billion tons of plastic have been produced since the 1950s — that’s equivalent to the weight of more than 800,000 Eiffel Towers. And only 20% of it has been recycled.
Here are several facts about plastic pollution:
- Worldwide, about 2 million plastic bags are used every minute.
- New Yorkers alone use 23 billion plastic bags every year (from NYCDEC)
- The average time that a plastic bag is used for is 12 minutes, while it takes around 500 years to biodegrade in the ocean.
- Plastic is killing more than 1.1 million seabirds and animals every year and causing harm to an astronomical number of animals.
- The pollution eventually returns to us - The average person eats 70,000 microplastics each year.
Plastic Ocean vividly portrays the problem. You can watch it:
After knowing these shocking facts, I decided to launch a web app in R shiny that discovered and visualized insights among the factors impacting plastic pollution across countries to help ENGOs resolve issues with a global vision.
Data Description
The data is collected from Science Advances published by Geyer in 2017 and Jambeck in 2015. After merging the datasets and doing some feature engineering, the variables in the dataset, shown as below, include country, population, coastal population, economic development, etc.:
Mismanaged waste from material that is either littered or inadequately disposed of could eventually enter the ocean via inland waterways, wastewater outflows and transport by wind or tides. Inadequately managed waste indicates the waste that is not formally managed, which includes disposal in dumps or open, uncontrolled landfills where it is not fully contained. Both types can end up polluting rivers and oceans.
Data Analysis and Visualization
As you can see from the picture below, I first explored all the variables by country on a map and bar chart and attached the corresponding finding.
Here are the observations I got from the exploration:
- Coastal countries with a large population have higher plastic waste generation. The top 2 countries are China and the United States.
- 5 out of the top 8 countries that have the highest per capita plastic waste are small island countries. The other 3 top countries are high-income countries. Based on these observations, geographical features (inland or coastal) and economic level(GDP Per Capita) appear to be factors that influence plastic pollution. They should be further discovered.
- The top 8 countries with the highest mismanaged plastic waste are all developing countries.
- Developed countries have noticeably lower mismanaged plastic waste per person and share.
- Developing countries have a significantly higher share of inadequately managed plastic waste, which has the highest risk of pollution.
Based on the observations above, I did a further analysis with an emphasis on the variables of plastic waste, mismanaged plastic waste, and coastal population and geographical features.
Per Capita Plastic Waste
As can be seen from the graph below, GDP per capita has a positive linear relationship with Plastic Waste Per Capita, which implies that Plastic waste tends to increase as people and countries get more productive / richer. The converse also hold: per capita plastic waste in low-income countries is noticeably smaller.
The plastic waste per capita in developed countries is significantly higher than in developing countries, as shown below.
Per Capita Mismanaged Plastic Waste
As demonstrated in the plot blew, per capita mismanaged plastic waste tends to be higher in industrialized middle-income and fast-growing developing countries.
Likely this happens because these countries' waste management infrastructure cannot to keep pace with their rapid industrial and manufacturing growth. The problem is compounded by imported massive quantities of plastic trash from developed countries. The result is that y developed countries have a small amount of mismanaged plastic waste combined with a significant amount of plastic waste.
Therefore, the development of sufficient waste management infrastructure in middle-income and growing lower-income countries is crucial to tackling the issue of plastic pollution.
As shown below, in contrast to the per capita plastic waste, the per capita mismanaged plastic waste in developing countries is significantly higher than in developed countries.
As demonstrated from the plot below, I engineered an economic growth variable by the average per capita GPD growing rate of the country. I measured the per capita mismanaged plastic waste against it. It seems that fast-growing countries have less mismanaged plastic waste on average. That might be because the most fast-growing countries are either landlocked oil-rich countries or low-income countries whose demand has not surged yet. I will take a closer look at it in future work.
Mismanaged Plastic Waste by Costal population and Geographical Features
As can be seen in the plot below, the coastal population has a positive correlation with mismanaged plastic waste across counties, which might because the waste generated in the coastal region has a higher risk of entering the ocean and producing severe environmental damage.
Note: Coastal population measured as the population within 50 kilometers of a coastline
As shown below, coastal countries have much higher mismanaged plastic waste per person than landlocked countries.
Therefore, the coastal countries need more help in building effective plastic management systems due to their higher risk of producing mismanaged plastic waste, especially in developing countries.
The governance of plastic pollution has become the problem that brooks no delay and can be issued starting from ourselves.
References
- http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/7/e1700782.full, Data published by Geyer, R., Jambeck, J. R., & Law, K. L. (2017). Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever made. Science Advances, 3(7), e1700782.
- http://science.sciencemag.org/content/347/6223/768/, Data published by Jambeck, J. R., Geyer, R., Wilcox, C., Siegler, T. R., Perryman, M., Andrady, A., ... & Law, K. L. (2015). Plastic waste inputs from land into the ocean. Science, 347(6223), 768-771.
- https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution#impacts-on-wildlife, Plastic Pollution by Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser, was first published in September 2018.
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