Bad diet: This seabird was a victim of plastic pollution. As plastic becomes near-indestructible, mountains of garbage on land and swirling vortexes of trash on the high seas, humans keep making more. Half of the plastic that people mostly use once and toss away was created in the past 30 years, the study says. Unless it's burnt, plastic has nowhere to go but in the ground or the water. "I think most experts agree these polymers ... are going to be with us for decades if not centuries," said one of the report's authors, Roland

There's 7 billion tonnes of plastic garbage on earth - about a tonne for every single one of us. Geyer, an associate professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara. "I think the danger is permanent global contamination with plastics," he said. The fire at the SKM recycling plant in Coolaroo is still smouldering. Credit:MFB "It's just going to be everywhere, in the soil, in the ocean, in the sediment of the ocean floor, and it's just going to accumulate."

The study comes as firefighters continue to battle a blaze at a recycling plant in Melbourne's north, a week after it erupted. Acrid smoke shrouds the suburb of Dallas last week. More than 115 homes had to be evacuated. Credit:Justin McManus Crews are using earth-moving machinery to pull apart piles of smouldering rubbish at SKM Recycling plant in Coolaroo, treating them with water and foam, the Melbourne Fire Brigade said. The fire broke out last Thursday, sending acrid smoke into the air and across the suburbs of Melbourne and causing more than 115 homes in neighbouring suburb Dallas to be evacuated. According to the head of Australia's recycling industry a glut of plastic is piling up at recycling plants because it's no longer worth recycling.

Grant Musgrove, chief executive of the Australian Council of Recycling, said more frequent fires at recycling centres might be caused by recyclers holding onto increasingly large quantities of flammable materials . Mr Musgrove said a slump in commodity prices, including oil, in the past three years had made plastic cheaper and recycling uncompetitive. "The slumping oil price causes operations to be non-commercial," Mr Musgrove said. Consumers are the polluters In 1960, plastic accounted for just 1 per cent of junk in municipal landfills across the world. As single-package containers led to an explosion in convenience and use, that number grew to 10 per cent in 2005.

A recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimated the amount of plastic debris floating in the open ocean at 7000 to 35,000 tons. "If current trends continue, the researchers predict more than 13 billion tons of plastic will be discarded in landfills or in the environment by 2050," the American Association for the Advancement of Science said in a statement announcing the study's release.. "I think for me that's the single most surprising thing, the implication of the large growth rate," said Geyer. Another surprise, he said, is how far the US lags behind China and Europe in recycling plastic material.

In the study, Geyer wrote, "On the basis of limited available data, the highest recycling rates in 2014 were in Europe (30 per cent) and China (25 per cent), whereas in the US, plastic recycling has remained steady at 9 per cent." Recycling only delays plastic's inevitable trip to a trash bin. Incineration is the only way to assure that plastic is eliminated, and Europe and China by far lead the United States in that category as well, up to 40 per cent compared with 16 per cent. But burning plastic is risky because if the emissions aren't carefully filtered, harmful chemicals become air pollution. As in other countries, the United States has been slow to enforce regulations on industry emissions.

China is easily the world's largest producer of plastics, with Europe and North America also looming large as major players, Geyer said. Other Asian nations round out a long list of manufacturers. But consumers are the polluters, and people on every continent participate, from the Arctic to Africa. Plastic's vampire-like life cycle is nothing new. What's new with this research is its use of plastic-production data with "product lifetime distributions from eight different industrial sectors" to build a scientific model that showed "how long plastics are in use before they reach the end of their useful lifetimes and are discarded," the study said. Scale is shocking Geyer, wrote the study with two colleagues, Jenna Jambeck, an associate professor at the University of Georgia, and Kara Lavender Law, a researcher at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

Each of them studied ocean garbage in the past, but Geyer, whose field is industrial ecology, the study of material and energy, suggested the plastics study. "I'm fascinated by materials and the way we use them ... in particular waste management." The scale of the world's plastic consumption and waste shocked them. "Even we were kind of surprised at the sheer magnitude of plastics being made and used," Geyer said. He said he hopes politicians, conservationists and consumers will pay attention to what they found.

"My hope is readers will get a sense of the sheer magnitude of the tide of plastics and the plastic-waste challenge we're facing," he said. Loading "It's enormous, and it's accelerating." The Washington Post