Where does my plastic go? An explainer for ages 8–11

Before you read

A scroll-through explainer for ages 8–11 that follows one bottle through four endings and answers the question most children ask: "If we recycle it, why is it still a problem?" Six facts, each with its source in brackets. On screen it is illustrated with a transcript and alt text; this is the full text.
Made and funded by No Plastic Today. Licence: CC BY 4.0.

You finish a drink. You are holding an empty plastic bottle. It weighs about 10 grams. Where it goes next is one of the biggest questions on Earth, because people buy roughly a million bottles like it every minute (market research reported by The Guardian, 2017: theguardian.com/environment/2017/jun/28/a-million-a-minute-worlds-plastic-bottle-binge-as-dangerous-as-climate-change).
Plastic is brilliant at its job: light, strong, waterproof, cheap. It is made mostly from oil and gas. The problem is not that plastic is bad. The problem is that we make things designed to last for decades and use them for ten minutes.

Most plastic goes here. The bin lorry takes it to a landfill (a lined pit that is covered over) or an incinerator (a furnace that burns it for energy).
In a landfill, plastic does not rot. It has nothing that worms or bacteria want to eat. Buried in the dark, it can stay almost unchanged for a very long time. Out in the sunlight and the waves, it breaks into smaller and smaller pieces, but it still does not disappear. Scientists say popular numbers like "450 years" have no real source; the honest answer is "a very long time, and it turns into tiny bits" (Chamas and others, 2020: doi.org/10.1021/acssuschemeng.9b06635).
Fact: of all the plastic ever made up to 2015, 79% ended up in landfill or the environment, 12% was burned and only 9% was recycled (Geyer, Jambeck and Law, Science Advances, 2017: doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1700782).

Drop the bottle and the wind and rain do the rest: pavement to drain, drain to stream, stream to river, river to sea. In some parts of the world there is no bin lorry at all: about 1.2 billion people have no rubbish collection, so waste is dumped or burned in the open (Cottom, Cook and Velis, Nature, 2024: doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07758-6). That is where most ocean plastic starts, not from people like you dropping a wrapper, though that matters too.
Fact: more than 1,000 rivers carry 80% of the plastic that flows from rivers into the sea, and most are small rivers running through towns and cities (Meijer and others, Science Advances, 2021: doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aaz5803). Your local stream is part of the story.
In the sea, the bottle floats, bleaches, cracks and crumbles into microplastics. There are now an estimated 171 trillion plastic pieces floating on the ocean surface (Eriksen and others, PLOS ONE, 2023: doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0281596). Animals eat them or get tangled: 914 species so far (Kühn and van Franeker, 2020: doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2019.110858).
The "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" is real, but it is not an island. It is a huge, thin soup of mostly tiny pieces, and nearly half its weight is lost fishing nets (Lebreton and others, 2018: doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-22939-w).

The bottle is sorted, washed, shredded into flakes, melted and made into new bottles, fleece or pipes. This is the ending everyone hopes for.
So why is it only 9%? Three reasons. (1) There are many kinds of plastic (look for the numbers 1 to 7 in the triangle) and they cannot be melted together, so sorting is hard and mixed packaging like crisp packets is nearly impossible. (2) Dirty or mixed loads get rejected. (3) New plastic is often cheaper than recycled plastic, so nobody wants to buy the recycled stuff.
Fact: in 2019 about 9% of the world's plastic waste was recycled, 19% burned, about half landfilled and 22% dumped or lost (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Global Plastics Outlook, 2022: oecd.org/en/about/news/press-releases/2022/06/global-plastic-waste-set-to-almost-triple-by-2060.html). Recycling is good. It is just not enough on its own.

Now imagine the bottle was never made. You had a refill bottle. You filled it at the tap. Same drink, no 10 grams of plastic, no lorry, no factory, no river.
This is the ending that scientists and the United Nations say matters most. Reusing things could cut plastic pollution more than any other single change, and together with better recycling and new materials could cut it by 80% by 2040 with things that already exist (UN Environment Programme (UNEP), Turning off the Tap, 2023: unep.org/resources/turning-off-tap-end-plastic-pollution-create-circular-economy).
The order to remember: Refuse (don't take it), Reduce (take less), Reuse (use it again), Recycle (last resort for what is left), Rot (compost what can rot). Recycling is fourth for a reason.

Count your lunchbox for a week (the Classroom Plastic Audit on this site shows you how).
Pick the heaviest item, not the most common one. A bottle (10 g) weighs as much as 25 straws (0.4 g each).
Try one of the "Convince your parents" cards.
Find out where your nearest stream or river goes. Join a ten-minute litter pick there.

Every number above has its source in brackets. If a fact on the internet does not come with one, ask where it came from. Some famous plastic "facts" turn out to be wrong, and spotting that is a superpower.

Sources last verified 22 September 2026. Page updated 24 September 2026. How we check sources