THESIS_accountability
Thesis · accountability tool · plastic → ocean → food

THESIS_accountability

Every piece of single-use plastic has a route. Most of it gets buried or burned. Some of it escapes, breaks into pieces too small to see, and comes back to us in seafood, salt, and the fruit and vegetables grown in contaminated soil. Enter your day below to trace yours.

Since you opened this page
Today, since local midnight
0 lbplastic thrown away worldwide
0 tonsplastic thrown away worldwide
0 lbactually recycled (9% of it)
0 tonsactually recycled (9% of it)
0 lbwent into the ocean
0 tonswent into the ocean

The ocean takes in a whole year of your plastic every 0.0 s. Rates used: 353 million metric tons of plastic waste a year, 9% of it recycled (OECD, 2022); about 11 million metric tons a year into the ocean, roughly 770 lb every second (Lau et al., 2020). Plastic sent to recycling is often not recycled: about 40% of what is collected ends up as residue that is burned or dumped.

Step 1 · Your day in plastic

Where your plastic goes

Items you throw away per dayExample day
    0 ozper day
    0 lbper year

    6.2% is the global average: 22 of 353 million tons of plastic waste leaked into the environment in 2019 (OECD). Where collection is weak, the share is far higher.

    Live flow · 1 dot = some of your plastic
    whole items recycled burned or landfilled escaped and breaking apart Shares from OECD 2022: 15% sorted for recycling, 9% recycled, 19% burned, 28% of escaped plastic to water, 72% to land. Recycled plastic loops back into new items. Later splits are illustrative.
    0 ozof your plastic actually gets recycled each year (9%)
    0 ozof your plastic escapes each year
    0 ozreaches rivers and the sea
    0 ozends up in soil, where crops grow
    0pieces if it breaks into 1 mm fragments
    0particles at 2 µm, the size found inside fruit
    Step 2 · What comes back

    Plastic in your fruit

    A 2020 study of produce sold in Catania, Italy, counted microplastic particles inside fruit and vegetables. Most were about 1.5 to 2.5 µm across, small enough to be taken up through roots. Pick what you ate today.

    0particles in today's servings

    1 dot = 100,000 particles
    Sources & caveats

    How these numbers work

    Ocean inflow

    About 11 million metric tons of plastic entered the ocean in 2016, projected to nearly triple by 2040 without action. Lau et al., Science 2020, with The Pew Charitable Trusts and SYSTEMIQ ("Breaking the Plastic Wave").

    Escape share

    OECD Global Plastics Outlook (2022): 353 Mt of plastic waste in 2019, 22 Mt leaked to the environment, 6.1 Mt of that to rivers and the sea. Estimates of ocean inflow differ between studies because methods differ.

    Fruit and vegetables

    Oliveri Conti et al., Environmental Research 2020. Mean particles per gram: apple 195,500; pear 189,550; broccoli 126,150; carrot 101,950; lettuce 50,550. The study gives no potato value, so the page uses carrot as a proxy. Fruit and carrot were peeled. One city, one lab method; the counts are debated and other studies measure larger particles with much lower counts.

    Root uptake

    Li et al., Nature Sustainability 2020 showed wheat and lettuce taking up sub-micron plastic through cracks where side roots emerge, and moving it into shoots.

    Fragment math

    Pieces are modeled at a density of 1.2 g/cm³: a 1 mm cube weighs 1.2 mg (≈833 pieces per gram); a 2 µm sphere weighs about 5 picograms (≈200 billion per gram). Real fragments vary widely in shape and size.

    Item weights

    Typical weights: 16 oz PET bottle ≈0.35 oz, thin shopping bag ≈0.19 oz, takeout container ≈0.9 oz. These are averages; your items may be lighter or heavier. For scale, the average U.S. resident generates about 287 lb of plastic waste a year (Law et al., Science Advances 2020).