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. 2021 Sep 25;5:100119. doi: 10.1016/j.envadv.2021.100119

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© 2021 The Author(s)

Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.

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Fig. 1 — Hypothetical past, present and future worldwide plastic production. Plastic production is predicted to increase to 600 million tons in 2040 based on the data available of plastic production rate between 2008 and 2019 (Tiseo, 2021) and assuming a linear trend. However, based on table 1 data, it has been estimated that COVID-19 caused a drastic increase of plastic production to around 698 million tons in only 2020. Detailed calculation is provided in the SI.