Plastic: How do we break the packaging waste cycle?

Almost every product contains some form of plastic.

There is also a lot of packaging waste.

Shrink-wrapped masks and tests in the pandemic are just the most obvious.

The increasing use of plastic presents us with a problem: our entire ecosystem is suffocating on what we throw away.

Plastics are taking hold in the soil and our seas are some of the dirtiest places on the planet - several huge eddies of garbage circulate on the surface of our oceans.

In fact, that's just a tiny fraction of the plastic in the ocean.

The larger part is below the water surface or on the bottom.

It is not entirely clear how much it is, but it is probably tens of millions of tons of plastic.

And all this harms the climate, after all, plastic is an integral part of the fossil industry.

The SPIEGEL author Johann Grolle has dealt with it intensively. In his article about our plastic waste problem he writes: »With the flood of plastic, humans have fundamentally changed planet earth.

Between 1950 and 2015, a total of about 8,300 million tons of plastic were produced worldwide - almost four times the biomass of all animals alive today.

And because plastic molecules are mostly stable and non-biodegradable, most of that plastic still exists today, in automobiles or children's rooms, on landfills or beaches, inside animals or plants, or deposited in sediment.

In other words: there is already more plastic than animals on earth.«

In this episode of "Climate Report", our podcast on the climate crisis, we deal with our plastic problem.

After all, even the UN Environment Assembly recently agreed that plastic pollution should be stopped.

How is that supposed to work?

What are the right approaches and solutions to curb our plastic waste?

This time the guest is Johann Grolle from the SPIEGEL science department.

Curious?

Then listen to our »climate report« here: