Is It Worse to Burn Oil or Turn It Into Plastic?

And more questions on the future of plastic and the environment

Mike Berners-Lee
OneZero
Published in
5 min readJul 18, 2019

--

Credit: Barcroft Media/Getty Images

How much plastic is there in the world?

An estimated 9 billion tons of plastic has been produced so far. Of this, 5.4 billion tons has been chucked into landfill or scattered onto land and sea. To get a sense of what this…

--

--

Mike Berners-Lee
OneZero

Mike is a Professor at Lancaster University. His most recent book is “There is No Planet B”. He is a leading expert in carbon accounting and metrics.