The average UK household uses 480 plastic bottles a year, but recycles only 270 of them

Estimates suggest that there are more than 5 trillion pieces of plastic floating on the surface of the world’s oceans

A million plastic bottles are bought around the world every minute and the number will jump another 20% by 2021, creating an environmental crisis some campaigners predict will be as serious as climate change.

About 20,000 bottles are bought every second.

More than 480bn plastic drinking bottles were sold in 2016 across the world, up from about 300bn a decade ago. If placed end to end, they would extend more than halfway to the sun. By 2021 this will increase to 583.3bn

Fewer than half of the bottles bought in 2016 were collected for recycling

In the UK 38.5m plastic bottles are used every day

Plastic bottles = 10% of Thames waste

They take 450 years to break down

¾ flounders in Thames have ingested plastic

University of Exeter, has previously warned that people produce around 300 million tons of plastic a year, roughly the same weight as all the humans on the planet. Around half of all plastic produced is used once and then thrown away.

Henderson Island, part of the Pitcairn group, is covered by 18 tonnes of plastic – the highest density of anthropogenic debris recorded anywhere in the world BUT The 17.6 tonnes of plastic on Henderson accounted for only 1.98 seconds’ worth of annual production, found the paper – co-written by Lavers with Alexander Bond – published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday.

 Plastic was found in a third of UK-caught fish, including cod, haddock, mackerel and shellfish

The US buys over ½ billion water bottles a week – this could circle globe 5 times