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+875 per minute · since 00:00 UTC
This is a live, continuously changing estimate. It isn't printed here because a figure on paper would be wrong the moment you read it — see the current value at https://earthnow.app/signal/plastic-produced-today.
Estimated, not measured
More than half of all plastic ever made has been made this century, and the great majority of it has never been recycled. Production, not disposal, is where the number is decided.
Estimated tonnes of new plastic produced since midnight UTC.
Nobody counts this as it happens. EarthNow takes a published figure for the whole day, divides it by the 86,400 seconds in a day, and multiplies by the seconds elapsed since midnight UTC. So the value climbs smoothly and is the right order of magnitude — but the smoothness is arithmetic, not observation. Nothing happening in the world is being watched in real time.
value = daily total ÷ 86,400 × seconds since 00:00 UTC
A consequence worth knowing: the counter resets at midnight UTC, not at your midnight. And because the figure advances at a constant rate, this page cannot tell you whether today is unusual. For that you need a measurement.
460 million tonnes of plastics produced in a year.
The figure is theirs; the running total is ours. Cite them for the number, and EarthNow for what it looks like as it accumulates.
Citation