1 Billion Phone Case Crisis

Did you know that around 1 billion plastic phone cases end up in landfill every year?

That is not only shocking, it is also quite terrifying. The plastic problem is actually mind blowing when you get in to it. Let's dive in to some detail, and more importantly look at positive ways forward for change.

The plastic situation

We all know the plastic problem is huge, but when you start to look at the stats, they're quite frankly horrifying! In 1950, approximately 2 million tonnes of plastic was produced a year. In 2021 390 million tonnes was produced. Fast forward to 2050 and it's expected that production will have QUADRUPLED (from 2019) to reach a staggering 1480 million tonnes produced, in a year. That is almost 3x the total weight of the world population!

We need to change our habits and fast. For example worldwide, Coca-Cola produces 167,000 plastic bottles every single minute. If you put them in a line, they would go to the moon and back 31 times! Nothing about that is OK.

How plastic affects climate change

If we want to limit the warming of the earth to one and a half degrees by 2050, we need to emit less than 570 billion tons of CO2. Given that it's estimated that plastic production, and the incineration of plastic waste contributes 10% to 13% of this number, then this is clealry something industry wide we need to tackle together. Every brand producing plastic goods could, and SHOULD be doing better.

What part do phone cases play & what can we do?

It's estimated that there are 7.64 billion smartphones in use, and that 68% of smartphone owners use a phone case. Roughly 1 BILLION plastic phone cases are sold per year, and the majority of those end up in landfill. This is becasue most cases are made from mixed plastics which can't be recycled. So let's visualise that. The average case weighs around 30g, multiply that by 1 billion and that's about 30,000 tonnes of plastic going to landfill every year, just in phone cases. Thats the equivalent of 5000 African elephants worth of plastic, which will take up to 500 years to decompose.

So what can we do?

One thing we can all do is to shop/manufacture consciously, and circular products are a great start. EATS. phone cases are 100% circular meaning the case can be returned and ground down to be made into a new case, therefore avoiding landfill all together (read more about the process here).

We understand you need to protect your device. But we just can’t accept 1 billion cases going to landfill every year - so we sweat the ‘how do we fix this’ so you don’t have to.. From design to production all of our materials and manufacturing processes are designed to put the least amount of strain on the planet as possible. We’re learning all the time, and are proud to be accredited with B Corp certification. We need to work together though, both as consumers and as industries. One planet, one chance.