• A plastic milk jug takes 1 million years to decompose.
• A plastic cup can take 50 - 80 years to decompose.
• Recycled plastic can be used to make things like trashcans, park benches, playground equipment, decks, and kayaks.
• Special fleece-like fabrics used in clothes and blankets can be made out of recycled plastic bottles.
• Americans use 2.5 million plastic bottles every HOUR.
• Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1 million sea creatures every year.
• Recycling plastic saves twice as much energy as burning it in an incinerator.
• A United States law, implementing an international agreement called MARPOL Annex V, became effective on December 31, 1988. It prohibits the disposal of plastics into the marine environment and requires ports to provide reception facilities for ship-generated plastic waste.
• Today, Americans generate 10.5 million tons of plastic waste a year but recycle only 1 or 2 % of it.
• An estimated 14 billion pounds of trash, much of it plastic is dumped in the world's oceans every year.
• The worldwide fishing industry dumps an estimated 150,000 tons of plastic into the ocean each year, including packaging, plastic nets, lines, and buoys.
• About 1,200 plastic soft drink and salad dressing containers could carpet the average living room.
• It takes 1,050 HDPE (#2) milk jugs to make a six-foot plastic lumber park bench.
• Every year we make enough plastic film to shrink-wrap the state of Texas.
• Nearly every piece of plastic EVER made still exists today.

Plastic is one of the few new chemical materials, which pose environmental problem. Polyethylene, polyvinyl chloride and polystyrene are largely used in the manufacture of plastics. Synthetic polymers are easily molded into complex shapes, have high chemical resistance, and are more or less elastic. Some can be formed into fibers or thin transparent films. These properties have made them popular in many durable or disposable goods and for packaging materials. These materials have molecular weight ranging from several thousands to 1, 50,000. Excessive molecular size seems to be mainly responsible for the resistance of these chemicals to biodegradation and their persistence in soil environment for a long time. Plastic in the environment is regarded to be more an aesthetic nuisance than a hazard, since the material is biologically quite inert. The plastic industry in the US alone is $ 50 billion per year and is obviously a tempting market for biotechnological enterprises. Biotechnological processes are being developed as an alternative to existing route or to get new biodegradable biopolymers. 20% of solid municipal wastes in US is plastic. Non-degradable plastics accumulate at the rate of 25 million tonnes per year. According to an estimate more than 100 million tonnes of plastic is produced every year all over the world. In India it is only 2 million tonnes. In India use of plastic is 2 kg per person per year while in European countries it is 60 kg per person per year while that in US it is 80 kg per person per year.