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There are five trillion pieces of plastic in our oceans. A plastic bag was found 36,000 feet below the surface, at the ocean’s deepest point, the Mariana Trench.

Most of the plastic found at the bottom of the sea by divers (89%) has one thing in common, the Deep Sea Debris Database reported: it’s waste such as plastic bottles and bags, designed to be used just once, then thrown away.

This visible plastic is just the tip of the iceberg. Tests by Newcastle University researchers found that sea creatures living in the deepest reaches of the sea had fragments of plastic in their stomachs and muscles.

Sea creatures are dying across the world as a result of our addiction to plastic, with a sperm whale washing ashore in Spain last year with 28 kilos of plastic in its stomach, including plastic bags, nets and a jerry can. It had died from gastric shock.

The sheer scale of the world’s plastic habit is difficult to comprehend. Every minute of every day, the equivalent of a truckload of plastic enters the world’s oceans, according to Greenpeace statistics.

Waste such as bottles, nappies and beer holders can last for up to 450 years in the environment. Some plastics last for 1,000 years. Sir David Attenborough’s TV series Blue Planet raised awareness of the problem around the world in 2017, with a heartbreaking episode showing albatrosses feeding plastic to their chicks.

Speaking to Prince William at the Davos in Switzerland this year, Sir David called for action against plastic pollution, saying: ‘Every breath of air we take, every mouthful of food that we take, comes from the natural world.

And if we damage the natural world, we damage ourselves.’ Awareness of the issue has got steadily higher, with the UN now campaigning against plastic pollution, seen as one of the world’s most pressing environmental issues. The European Union is set to approve a total ban on one-use plastics such as straws.

But the problem is not getting better: it’s getting worse. A million plastic bottles are bought every minute – and that is forecast to rise another 20% by 2021, driven by the spread of Western lifestyles around the world.

By 2021, the number of plastic bottles sold around the world will hit 583.3 billion, up from 300 billion just over a decade ago. By 2025, the amount of plastic in the ocean could triple, according to a UK Government report entitled Foresight Future of the Sea. Research by the Ellen MacArthur foundation suggests that by 2050, the ocean will contain more plastic by weight than fish.

Andy Sharpless, CEO of ocean conservation non-profit organisation Oceana, says: ‘More plastic was manufactured in the previous decade than in the whole of the last century. Our oceans can feed a billion people every day… but only if we look after them properly. We cannot afford to keep reaching for the plastic bottle without seeing it for the dirty, toxic, pollutant that it really is.’ How it happened The truly shocking part of this man-made crisis is how quickly it has happened. The first fully synthetic plastic, Bakelite, was only shown off in 1907.

Disposable, one-use plastics only came into widespread use after World War II, with large scale industrial production taking off in the 1950s.

The 50s saw the invention of iconic plastic products such as Barbie, Lego and the hula hoop, and the invention of the high-density polyethylene commonly used in today’s plastic drinks bottles.

The cheap, durable bottles rapidly replaced glass as a container for everything except beer and wine. In 2017, 480 billion plastic bottles were sold worldwide.

Plastic bags are, likewise, a recent invention. The disposable polyethylene bag was patented in 1965, and came into widespread use in the 80s.

By the 90s, the amount of plastic waste being generated had tripled in less than two decades, according to UN statistics. As disposable ‘Western’ lifestyles have spread around the world, the habit of one-use plastics has spread with it.