Choosing sources
We prefer peer-reviewed studies, systematic reviews and reports from public institutions (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), UN Environment Programme (UNEP), national agencies). Industry and non-governmental organisation (NGO) reports are included where they publish their data and methods, and are labelled. Press releases are not sources; we go to the paper.
Grading evidence
- High: meta-analyses, systematic reviews, large cohorts, or independently replicated findings.
- Medium: one well-designed study, or an institutional report built on published data.
- Low: small samples, pilots, models with wide uncertainty, or unreplicated industry-funded work.
- Contested: seriously disputed, retracted or contradicted. Kept, with the reasons, so readers can see why a popular claim is shaky.
Claims we do not use
| Popular claim | Why we avoid it |
|---|---|
| “You eat a credit card of plastic a week” | Based on a 2019 estimate later re-analysed; a 2021 study in Environmental Science & Technology puts median intake around 4 micrograms a week, thousands of times lower. |
| “A spoon of plastic in your brain” | Nihart et al. 2025 has been challenged over duplicated images, and because fats in brain tissue can be mistaken for plastic in the test used; an April 2026 Nature Health study found roughly 100 times lower levels. |
| “More plastic than fish in the sea by 2050” | A 2016 projection built on two highly uncertain estimates of fish biomass and plastic inflow. |
| “Plastic takes 450 years to degrade” | No measurement supports a single figure; degradation depends on polymer, light, oxygen and temperature. |
| “Ten rivers carry 90% of ocean plastic” | Superseded by Meijer et al. 2021: about a thousand rivers account for 80%. |
| “640,000 tonnes of ghost gear a year” and “5 trillion bags a year” | Untraceable to a primary measurement. |
Re-checking
Every study, statistic, material and policy carries a ‘verified on’ date. Items older than twelve months appear on an internal dashboard for re-checking. Corrections are logged on the item itself.
Footprint calculator
Each item has a typical plastic weight per use and a source: 500 ml PET bottle 12 g (lightweighting data from the Union of European Soft Drinks Associations (UNESDA), the industry trade body; range 10 to 14 g); HDPE carrier bag 8.12 g (UK Environment Agency 2011 life-cycle assessment (LCA)); coffee cup plastic lining plus lid about 4 g (UK Government disposable cups evidence); straw 0.4 g and cutlery 2.6 g per piece (Eunomia/ICF for the European Commission, 2018); toothbrush 18 g (British Dental Journal 2020); nappy plastic content 12 g (UK Environment Agency 2023 nappy LCA); tea bag seal 0.2 g (Hernandez et al. 2019). Weekly counts × 52 = items per year; grams = items × weight. The ‘biggest win’ is the item whose swap avoids the most grams, using the swap’s avoidance fraction (for example a bamboo toothbrush avoids about 90% because the bristles are usually still nylon). The national comparison multiplies your total by 27.8 million, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) estimate of Australia’s population at the end of 2025. Weights are conservative and real products vary.
artificial intelligence (AI) in the news digest
Each week the site fetches curated news and research feeds, keeps items about plastics, and drafts a short summary. Some summaries are drafted with AI assistance; none is published until an editor has read it against the original. Publishers that forbid machine-learning use of their text (for example Phys.org) are listed headline-and-link only. Summaries never replace the source: every item links to it.
Data and application programming interface (API)
All content is available as JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) at /wp-json/noplastic/v1/ (search, facets, stats, materials, swaps, footprint) and through the standard WordPress REST API for each content type. Statistics and studies carry schema.org structured data. Site content is CC BY 4.0 unless stated; photographs are credited to their Unsplash photographers.