When purchasing a plastic bottle – water, your favorite fizzy pop, juice – you have probably only ever spent about ten minutes with it. Buy it, drink it, throw it away – that is the usual cycle. On the rare occasion you might keep hold of the bottle and re fill it and take it to work or the gym – increasing your relationship with the bottle to a couple of days rather than minutes.

But the lifespan of a plastic bottle isn’t only ten minutes, a couple of days, or even a couple of years. Since plastic bottles became a popular option in the 1950s, virtually every piece of plastic ever made still exists in some shape or form — unless it’s been incinerated.

Basically, even though you only spent ten minutes with it, that water bottle will outlive you, your children, and your children’s children and so on as it decomposes over the next 400+ years.

The facts are a little more shocking when you take into account that around the world roughly one million bottles are purchased every minute. It is also estimated that this year over half a trillion plastic bottles will be sold.

Sadly, unless recycled, these plastic bottles end up in landfill or in our oceans.