Not surprisingly, global plastic production has grown exponentially.
From 1950-2007 plastic production rose from
1.5 million tons to 270 million tons per year, an expansion
which kept pace with the simultaneous global population
growth from 2.7 to over 7 billion (Rochman, Browne, et
al., 2013). In 2012 alone, 288 million tons of plastic were
produced (Plastics Europe, 2013), which is approximately
the same weight of the entire human biomass