Hello, I'm Manuela Saragossa. This is Business Daily from the BBC. Coming up, the truth about plastic pollution.

In terms of plastic into the ocean, it's definitely a waste management problem. And I think that's kind of very much overlooked.

As more and more countries ban single-use plastics, are the replacements industries coming up with any better for the environment?

And where does all that plastic in the ocean come from anyway?

We don't have proper authorised scientific landfills. So a lot of our waste ends up in either

informal dumping grounds or drains and the rivers that end up in the oceans.

That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC.

Have you ever wondered how much plastic there is in the world? Well, we have the answer. It's

8 billion tonnes. But what does 8 billion tonnes even mean? Professor Tony Ryan is a polymer

chemist and sustainability leader at the University of Sheffield here in the UK.

I asked him to put it into context.

8 billion tonnes is a cube, 2 kilometres by 2 kilometres by 2 kilometres.

Which, okay, sounds like a big lump of plastic.

If you converted it into cling film, it'd go to Pluto and back 140 times.

Oh my goodness. Or you could wrap the earth in cling film, which is 510 million square

kilometres and have 25% spare. That's how much plastic there is. That's how much plastic there is.

And the problem with it is, it is thin generally and small. And all the plastic that ends up in the ocean might go in as a bottle

or a polystyrene cool box or a car bumper more often than not as a fishing net. And eventually

that'll get broken down into small pieces.

And ultimately...

But eventually, how long are we talking here?

It could be hundreds of years.

...