Thanks to continuous innovation, upgrades and a human need to be in front of the trends, the product lifecycle is getting shorter from electronic devices to clothes. As a result, mountains of obsolete, discarded items are being created that can take hundreds of years – and in the case of plastics, thousands – before they begin to break down. In 2019 alone, 2.01 billion metric tons of waste was generated, and if we continue at the same rate, that figure will increase to 3.40 billion metric tons – an increase of 70 percent – by 2050.
