Since plastic began to be mass-produced in the 1950s, the material has been building up in the environment and in people’s bodies. These five graphs illustrate just how bad the problem has gotten, and why delegates from more than 170 countries have committed to negotiating a global, legally binding treaty to “end plastic pollution.” The second part of the fifth round of talks began on Tuesday and is scheduled to run through August 14 in Geneva, Switzerland.

The world produced 2 million metric tons of plastic in 1950. That number doubled to 4 million by 1955, then doubled again to 8 million in 1960, and has been increasing exponentially ever since. By 2019, the world was producing about 460 million metric tons of plastic every year — about the same weight as as 88 Great Pyramids of Giza. 

Fossil fuel companies plan to produce even more plastic in the coming decades. According to a 2022 estimate from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD — an intergovernmental group that publishes reports and policy analyses — global production will reach 1.2 billion metric tons by 2060 unless some sort of restrictions are introduced. That’s more than 3,600 times the weight of the Empire State Building.

Skyrocketing plastic production has made life more convenient by making consumer goods and packaging lighter and cheaper. But it has also caused enormous waste management problems. Contrary to industry claims, plastic recycling does not work on a large scale: Only 9 percent of the plastic the world creates gets turned into a new product — and less than 1 percent is ever recycled more than once.

Most plastic — about 49 percent of it — is sent to landfills. Another 19 percent is burned in incinerators, and 22 percent is categorized by the OECD as “mismanaged” — a euphemism that means it’s burned in open pits, tossed into unofficial dumpsites, or littered into rivers and seas. Large pieces of plastic litter entangle and choke wildlife, and the small fragments that they break into — known as microplastics — leach hazardous chemicals that can further jeopardize animals and ecosystems.

The OECD estimates that 22 million metric tons of plastic waste escaped into the environment in 2019. Under a business-as-usual scenario in which petrochemical companies continue ramping up plastic production, pollution is predicted to outstrip waste management and recycling even further, doubling to 44 million metric tons by 2060. Stringent global action could reduce this pollution to just 6 million metric tons by 2060, according to the OECD. 

Plastics don’t only threaten the environment; they also threaten human health, in part because of their constitutive chemicals. A scientific paper published last month in the journal Nature identified 16,325 known plastic chemicals. Many are used as processing aids, or as additives that give plastic certain properties such as malleability. Of these chemicals, 4,219 — more than a quarter — are known to have hazardous properties in people or animals, such as carcinogenicity or the ability to bioaccumulate, making their way up the food chain as larger animals eater smaller ones. Most of the rest of the chemicals — 10,726, or 66 percent of the total — have never been assessed for toxicity. 

Global health and environmental agreements such as the Stockholm Convention cover fewer than 1,000 plastics-related chemicals. That means that 15,345 — about 94 percent of the total — are not subject to international regulations. Researchers who are part of the Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty say this gap poses unacceptable human health risks that should be addressed by the U.N. agreement, ideally via legally binding lists of groups of chemicals that treaty signatories have to phase out.

In addition to being a public health and environmental scourge, plastics are also increasingly being recognized as a climate change issue. They’re made from fossil fuels, after all. According to a study published last year by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, plastics were responsible for roughly 5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2019. That year, the industry’s emissions were nearly equivalent to those of India.

More recent research from the Plastics & Climate Project has identified significant data gaps on plastics’ climate footprint. In a systematic review published in April, they called for a deeper look at the release of greenhouse gases from existing plastic pollution, the effects of plastic pollution on the amount of heat the Earth traps, and the potential for microplastics to inhibit the natural processes that sequester carbon on the ocean floor. 

Decisions made during the plastic treaty negotiations will determine the future of plastic pollution. The single most effective intervention, according to modeling from a team of scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, is a global production cap. But other, less controversial policies — such as more recycling infrastructure and funding for waste management — would help, too. An ambitious scenario combining a production cap and those recycling policies and funding could prevent nearly 78 million metric tons of annual plastic pollution by 2050.