The "Our Planet Is Choking In Plastic"

It was an ordinary day.  Reading the morning paper when I came across an article le that read..."Our planet is choking in plastic."  It's as if we didn't know!  Well, the story began with... The world creates 57 million ton of plastic pollution every year and spends if from the deepest oceans to the highest mountaintop to the inside of people's bodies, according to a new study that also said more than two-thirds of it comes from the Global South.  It's enough pollution each year - about 52 million metric tons - to fill New York City's Central Park with plastic waste as high as the Empire State Building, according to researchers at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom.  They examined waste produced on the local level at more than 50,000 cities and towns across the world for a study in Wednesday's journal Nature.  The study examined plastic that goes into the open environment, not plastic that goes into landfills or is properly burned.  For 15% of the world's population, government fails to collect and dispose of waste, the study's authors said - a big reason Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa produce the most plastic waste.  That includes 255 million people in India, the study said.  Lagos, Nigeria, emitted the most plastic pollution of any city, according to study author Costas Velis, a Leeds environmental engineering professor.  The other biggest plastic polluting cities are New Delhi, Luanda, Angola, Karachi, Pakistan, and Al Qahirah, Egypt.  India leads the world in generating plastic pollution, producing 10.2 million tons a year, far more than double the next big-polluting nations, Nigeria and Indonesia.  China, often villainized for pollution, ranks fourth but is making tremendous strides in reducing waste, Velis said.  Other top plastic polluters are Pakistan, Bangladesh, Russia an Brazil.  Those eight nations are responsible for more than half of the globe's plastic pollution, according to the study's data.  The United States ranks 9th in plastic pollution with more than 52,500 tons, and th inter Kingdom ranks 135th with nearly 5,100 tons, according to the study.  In 2022s, most of the world's nations agree to make the first leally binding treaty on plastic pollution, including in the oceans.  Final treaty negotiations take place in South Korea in November.  The United Nations projects that plastics production I likely to rise from about 440 million tons a year to more than 1,200 million tons, saying "our planet is choking in plastic."  The study used artificial intelligence to concentrate on plastics that were improperly burned - about 57% of the pollution - or just dumped.  In both cases incredibly tiny microplastics, or nanopastics, are what turn the problem from a visual annoyance at beaches and a marine life problem to a human health threat, Velis said.  Several studies this year have looked at how prevalent microplastics are in our drinking water an in people's tissue, such as hearts, brains and testicles, with doctors and scientists still not quite sure what it means in terms of human health threats.  "The big time bomb of microplastics are these microplastics released in the Global South mainly," Velis said.  He called to "everybody's problem" and one that will haunt future generations.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.

Workers remove garbage floating on the Negro River, 

which has risen due to rain, in Manaus, Amazonas state

Brazil, on June 6, 2022