Fig. 5

Box model results for plastics cycling from 1950 to 2050. From 1950 to 2015 the model estimates the dispersal of P, LMP and SMP in different Earth surface reservoirs, based on known plastics production and waste generation. From 2015 to 2050 the model illustrates plastics production (A), amount of beached macroplastics, P (B), the total, P + LMP + SMP, annual river plastics flux (C), and atmospheric SMP deposition (atmo dep) to remote land surfaces (D), for two different scenarios with different plastics production and waste disposal trajectories: business as usual (BAU, grey dashed line) [3], and systems change scenario (SCS, orange short dashed line) [4], the latter representing feasible plastics policy implementation. Despite the large difference in plastics production towards 2050, 991 vs 168 Tg y^− 1 in BAU and SCS, environmental stocks and fluxes recover only slowly due to the large mobilization of mismanaged plastics from the terrestrial discarded plastics pools that continue to cycle between land, ocean and atmosphere. Two remediation scenarios are simulated for the 2025 to 2050 period: Discarded P remediation at a rate of 3% per year (yellow solid line), and combined discarded P, LMP and SMP remediation at a rate of 3% per year. See Methods and SI 2 for details on BAU and SCS