More than 5.5 million tons of plastic have entered the ocean this year.

More than 5.5 million tonnes of plastic have entered the oceans this year alone, according to environmental group WWF, which also warns of high plastic bag consumption – one million per minute.

In light of International Plastic Bag Free Day this Wednesday, Portuguese environmental organisations Zero and Quercus are warning of the need to limit the consumption of single-use plastic and focus on zero-waste production.

International Plastic Bag Free Day, aimed at raising awareness about the need to stop consuming single-use plastic bags and encouraging environmental conservation, was created by the organization “World Without Plastic Bags” and is always celebrated on the third day of July without any specific theme for each year.

Plastic can take hundreds of years to decompose and is particularly damaging to marine systems (80% of marine litter is made up of plastic), with dozens of species ingesting and becoming trapped in plastic. The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) estimates that 100,000 marine mammals die each year due to plastic pollution.

In a statement for the occasion, environmental association Quercus calls for a “future free of single-use plastic” and stresses the importance of a circular economy that values ​​resources instead of the usual “production, use and disposal”.

The association recalls in the document that plastic bags were invented in 1959 by Swedish engineer Sten Gustav Thulin (who, according to his son, thought the idea of ​​throwing away bags was strange) and that they began to appear in Portugal in 1980.

In 2015, a mandatory fee of €0.08 for lightweight plastic bags came into force. A fee of €0.04 for ultra-light bags was planned for January this year, but was postponed. The bags were set to be banned last year, but the rule was scrapped.

Quercus points out in its statement that five billion plastic bags could be consumed worldwide every year, more than 600 per person, with each one used for less than 25 minutes on average.

Citing Eurostat data, Quercus reports that plastic recycling is also facing challenges and that in 2018 only 32% of plastic waste in Europe was recycled.

Saying that it is governments and big companies that can make a difference, the association urges consumers to stop using plastic, think before throwing away food and avoid impulse buying.

It’s important not just to point fingers at plastic, but to “realize that the problem is the use-and-throw model, the single-use,” said Susana Fonseca of the environmental association Zero, which cites textiles as another example of single-use.

“The problem is a production and consumption model that requires vast amounts of materials to produce short-lived goods. If we reduce our use of plastic but don’t change the model, we are essentially shifting the impact from one side to the other…another one,” he said.

WWF says without immediate action, plastic pollution could triple by 2040 and stresses the importance of the fifth and final round of talks (in November in South Korea) to reach a global deal to end plastic pollution, given that production and consumption are “out of control.”

WWF warns that the European Union produces 3.4 million tonnes of plastic bags every year and that there is no point in producing something that will last hundreds of years and be used within minutes.

According to the environmental and sustainable development movement Zero Waste Europe, “if the world does not stop production completely, in 30 years the weight of plastic bags thrown into the seas and oceans will exceed the weight of all the creatures that live in them.”