• South Sudan launches $22m EU-funded Education project

A million plastic bottles are bought around the world every minute and the number will jump another 20% by 2021, creating an environmental crisis some campaigners predict will be as serious as climate change.

New figures obtained by the Guardian reveal the surge in usage of plastic bottles, more than half a trillion of which will be sold annually by the end of the decade.

The demand, equivalent to about 20,000 bottles being bought every second, is driven by an apparently insatiable desire for bottled water and the spread of a western, urbanised “on the go” culture to China and the Asia Pacific region.

More than 480bn plastic drinking bottles were sold in 2016 across the world, up from about 300bn a decade ago. If placed end to end, they would extend more than halfway to the sun. By 2021 this will increase to 583.3bn, according to the most up-to-date estimates from Euromonitor International’s global packaging trends report.

Most plastic bottles used for soft drinks and water are made from polyethylene terephthalate (Pet), which is highly recyclable. But as their use soars across the globe, efforts to collect and recycle the bottles to keep them from polluting the oceans, are failing to keep up.

Fewer than half of the bottles bought in 2016 were collected for recycling and just 7% of those collected were turned into new bottles. Instead most plastic bottles produced end up in landfill or in the ocean.

Between 5m and 13m tonnes of plastic leaks into the world’s oceans each year to be ingested by sea birds, fish and other organisms, and by 2050 the ocean will contain more plastic by weight than fish, according to research by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

Experts warn that some of it is already finding its way into the human food chain.

Scientists at Ghent University in Belgium recently calculated people who eat seafood ingest up to 11,000 tiny pieces of plastic every year. Last August, the results of a study by Plymouth University reported plastic was found in a third of UK-caught fish, including cod, haddock, mackerel and shellfish. Last year, the European Food Safety Authority called for urgent research, citing increasing concern for human health and food safety “given the potential for microplastic pollution in edible tissues of commercial fish”.

Dame Ellen MacArthur, the round the world yachtswoman, now campaigns to promote a circular economy in which plastic bottles are reused, refilled and recycled rather than used once and thrown away.

“Shifting to a real circular economy for plastics is a massive opportunity to close the loop, save billions of dollars, and decouple plastics production from fossil fuel consumption,” she said.

In the meantime, South Sudan’s Ministry of General Education on Wednesday launched EU-funded project worth 22.7 million dollars to pay monthly incentives of 40 dollars to over 30,000 primary school teachers across the country.

The Minister, Deng Hoc said that the ministry and partners would start paying at least 16,000 teachers within this week in order to enable teachers to teach and schools to function amid a biting economic crisis and insecurity.

Hoc said the 18-month programme dubbed “IMPACT’’ would be supported by newly designed Schools Attendance Monitoring System (SAMS) to enhance accountability mechanisms to ensure only public teachers who were working and regularly attend school receive the payment.

He said the project would provide critical support to South Sudan’s weak education system which had been impacted by civil war, poor infrastructure and low salaries to teachers.

“This project is adding value in the sense that it will give teachers extra money to improve their purchasing power which will in turn improve the quality of life of the teachers.

“That will motivate the teachers to go work on regular basis and improve the quality of education in the country,” Hoc said.

South Sudan’s education indicators remain among the worst in the world.

Official data from the ministry of education shows annual allocation to education stood at just six per cent for 2015-2016.

A report by UNICEF released in September 2016 said South Sudan is the second country in the world after Liberia with the highest proportion of out-of-school children.

Additional report from Guardian