Taste the Plastic: How Coca Cola Is Poisoning the Planet for Profit [video]

Suppose every piece of macro plastic sheds 0.1% of its mass yearly due to weathering, and suppose that there are 10 billion tons of plastic waste. We calculate

1. The half life

2. The microplastic production rate

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import math

# Define the rate at which macroplastic turns into microplastic per year rate_per_year = 0.1 / 100 # 0.1%

# Half-life formula for exponential decay: T_half = ln(2 )/ decay_constant

# Here, decay_constant is the rate_per_year

half_life = math.log(2 ) / rate_per_year half_life # 693.1471805599452 years

# Initial amount of macroplastic in metric tons

initial_macroplastic = 10 * 10*9 # 10 billion metric tons

# Annual production of microplastic is 0.1% of the initial macroplastic per year

annual_microplastic = initial_macroplastic * rate_per_year

annual_microplastic # 10 million metric tons.

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We produce 350 million tons of plastic waste a year. Over 30 years that's 10 billion tons.

The .1% weathering rate was conservative. So weathering likely creates more than 10 million tons in microplastic annually. And will probably do so for at least a couple hundreds of years.