Most plastic waste ends up in landfills or incinerators
While plastic is a staple of modern life, only nine percent of it is successfully recycled because sorting different chemical types is often too expensive and labor-intensive.
The global reliance on plastic has created a massive waste management crisis that current infrastructure is largely unable to solve. In modern society, roughly 79 percent of all plastic waste is discarded into landfills, while another 12 percent is burned, a process that releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This leaves a mere 9 percent that is actually recycled into new products.
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