Abstract:

Planet Earth is our common home in which we live, farm, and in which in 1987 we decided, at the initiative of the UN, to organize our common future. From the general Earth, oceans and seas account for 71%, while only 29% occupy land. This is only 14.8 gha, of which only 13.1 gha is available for human development. Of these available 13.1 gha, thoughtlessly, about 9% of areas are devastated each year. Humanity entered the 21st century with a "supply" of life-giving areas of 11.4 gha. There is, on average, about 2 ha of land on the globe per person (exactly 1.91 ha). It is an area of ​​two 100-square-meter plots. The structure of areas useful for production ensuring the lives of people and other organisms is as follows: arable land 49%, meadows and pastures 29%, forests 11%, built-up areas 4%, the remaining 7% devastated. The way land is used depends on who uses it. It turns out that there are nations that do not exceed the two-hectare "allocation", but there are also those who live at the expense of other nations, appropriating not only their allocation, but also the allocation of future generations. Human needs for natural resources are measured by the size of their ecological footprint. The size of the ecological footprint is influenced by partial footprints, the largest of which is the carbon footprint. The size of this footprint is significantly influenced by waste produced by society. Plastic waste is the most dangerous. The paper presents an analysis of the volume of plastic municipal waste in the years 2006-2018 in Poland and Europe, as well as the situation in the processing of this waste.