Oxygen bombs, cans and mainly plastics. Up to 1,600 kilos have been found by a French mountaineer and explorer in recent weeks in the Himalayas, more than 8,000 meters high. The deepest part of the ocean is no exception. At the bottom of the Mariana Trench, a plastic bag and candy wrappers have been seen. “Anywhere we can imagine there are already significant remains of plastic“, says Julio Barea, head of the Greenpeace Spain Waste Campaign.

There are authentic plastic islands in paradisiacal destinations in the Mediterranean or the Pacific. We coexist, we live or we ingest plastics or microplastics on a daily basis, such as those found in tap water, in our feces, and in the bloodstream. “There is plastic in our viscera, in our lungs and even circulating in our blood,” explains Barea.

The annual production of this material has been doubled in the last twenty years, up to 460 million tons and 40% of all that production is for single use. Barely 9% of the plastic we use is recycled and, as the Greenpeace expert points out, “we need to turn off the pollution faucet, in this case mass production and mass consumption.”

To put an end to this emergency, an international meeting is being held in Paris where the most ambitious goal is to ban single-use plastics, but not all countries are in favor. It depends on us that this plague continues invading us.