If you think about it, plastics should be considered one of the defining technologies of the 20th century. Their flexibility, cheap manufacturing costs, and resistance to degradation has meant the use of plastics outpaced most other man-made materials. Today, many of us can't remember a world without plastic, which went into large-scale production in the 1950s. But we're now learning the costs of this wonder material— oceans full of indestructible micro-particles that are harming sea life and polluting waterways. We have no idea how to get rid of them.

With a study published on Wednesday in Science Advances, we know how much plastic we've created, and where most of it has gone. This represents the first global analysis of all the plastics ever made on the planet, and big surprise, it isn't pretty.

As of 2015, it finds, humanity has produced over 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic. Of that, 6.3 billion metric tons has become waste. With just over 7 billion people on the Earth as of 2015, this would represent more than one metric ton per human being. Most plastics don't really biodegrade, and can hang around for hundreds or thousands of years.

Only 9 percent of the 6.3 billion tons of waste was recycled

The study authors, who are based at the University of Georgia and the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), as well as with the nonprofit Sea Education Association, gathered the figure after analyzing industry sources, and some were easier to find than others. "It's basically putting together a big jigsaw puzzle. The only challenge is that you have to find the puzzle pieces first," said lead author Roland Geyer, associate professor at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at UCSB.

Considering most of it has been for single-use product packaging, from CD shrinkwrap to the disposable lids on coffee cups, that means we've basically thrown all of it away. But wait—what about all those recycling programs?

Read More: Ocean Currents Are Carrying Our Plastic Garbage to the Arctic

Geyer and his team found that only 9 percent (!) of the 6.3 billion tons of waste was ultimately recycled. As previously reported on Motherboard, there are actually a number of surprising hurdles to plastics recycling. It can be difficult to do, and we still don't collate and sort out our personal recycling as enthusiastically as we should.