500bn plastic bottles a year: Give planet a Christmas gift

Earlier this year the carbonated water company Coca-Cola conceded that it produces 3m tonnes of plastic packaging a year — roughly 300m a day.

Those figures relate to 2017. The company did not reveal the scale of its bottle production — an understandable silence — but when its packaging footprint is translated into 500ml plastic bottles, it amounts to about 108bn bottles a year, more than a fifth of the world’s annual PET bottle output of about 500bn — a growing Everest of plastic waste.