World Bank has declared that even though approximately 2.24 billion tonnes of solid waste was produced in 2020, yet, this figure is likely to rise by 73% to 3.88 billion tonnes by 2050.
This is clearly pushing the narrative that portrays plastic as a particularly problematic phenomenon.
The BBC says research from the Universities of Georgia and California calculations, clearly shows that from the beginning of large-scale production of the material in the 1950s until 2015, more than 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic waste has been produced,
Someone who will not find those statistics surprising is Mikela Druckman. She has spent a lot of time looking at what we throw away, as the founder of Greyparrot, a UK start-up that has created an AI system designed to analyse waste processing and recycling facilities.
“In a single day you will have literally mountains of waste in one facility coming through, and what’s very shocking and surprising is that it never stops,” she says. There are no holidays for waste, it just keeps coming.”
Greyparrot places cameras above the conveyor belts of around 50 waste and recycling sites in Europe, utilising AI software to analyse what passes through in real time.
