Grade 11 English Reading Uses Plastic Waste Statistics for Group Exercise

How the reading activity works

Activity 7, Text 2, appears in the Reading section of Unit 2, "Love Your Environment," in the first-semester Grade 11 SMA English textbook. Sriwijaya Post cites the Ministry of Education's book portal as its source.

The assignment uses Jigsaw Reading: students form home groups of four, with each member responsible for understanding one paragraph and becoming its expert in an expert group. The teacher is to explain the process step by step.

Production figures and their research background

The passage describes annual plastic production rising from almost nothing in the 1950s to approximately 350 million tons in 2015. It gives a cumulative total of 7.8 billion tons over that period, equivalent to more than one ton per person alive at the end of 2015.

Those statistics trace back to the first global analysis of all mass-produced plastics, published in Science Advances on July 19, 2017, by Roland Geyer, Jenna R. Jambeck and Kara Lavender Law. According to the University of Georgia College of Engineering, that study estimated cumulative virgin-plastic production through 2015 at 8,300 million metric tons. The reading passage's stated total is 7.8 billion tons.

The study also described how rapidly production had expanded: about half of the plastics made from 1950 through 2015 were produced during the final 13 years of that period. Roughly half of all plastics became waste within four years of entering use, according to the university's account.

What the passage says about disposal

The reading describes recycling as unheard of before the 1980s, with plastics either sent to landfills or burned from the 1950s through the 1980s. After recycling began in the 1980s, the passage says, the proportion of plastic products recycled increased by an average of 0.7 percent a year.

For the end of 2015, the passage puts the landfill share at 55 percent of all plastic products, representing approximately 4,600 million tons of accumulated waste. It lists another 700 million tons as incinerated and 2,500 million tons as still in active use.

The passage places the total amount recycled at just 500 million tons, or roughly 6 percent of all plastics produced since the 1950s. Of that recycled material, 100 million tons remained in use; the remaining 400 million tons had subsequently been discarded in landfills or incinerated. It also says about 3 percent of the plastic waste generated each year reaches the oceans, giving a figure of approximately 8 million tons by the end of 2015.

Later findings and a conditional projection

The OECD's first Global Plastics Outlook, released February 22, 2022, provides figures for a later period. It reported that global plastic production reached 460 million metric tons in 2019, twice the 2000 level, and attributed 3.4 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions to plastics.

The OECD report put the recycled share of plastic waste at 9 percent. Incineration accounted for 19 percent, landfills for 50 percent and mismanaged waste for the remaining 22 percent.

For 2019, the OECD estimated that 6.1 million metric tons of plastic waste entered aquatic environments, including 1.7 million metric tons that flowed into oceans. At the time of the report, it estimated accumulated plastic waste at 30 million metric tons in seas and oceans and a further 109 million metric tons in rivers.

The 2017 study also offered a conditional outlook: if production and waste-management trends continued, landfills and the natural environment would contain roughly 12 billion metric tons of plastic waste by 2050. The University of Georgia College of Engineering described that mass as about 35,000 times the weight of the Empire State Building.