Plastic in Our Oceans
At school we've been watching a documentary in geography, it's on netflix actually, it is about plastic in the ocean. I know that it sounds like a typical half attempt to make a bunch of teenagers actually care about something, but it actually hit me quite hard. I knew that the situation with plastic was bad but I had know idea exactly how bad. For example, did you know that an average UK adult will use 150 plastic bottles a year, if you were to times that by every adult in the country the number would be absolutely immense (roughly 9000000000 in fact), I guess that it's just a number but you can't even begin to imagine how detrimental to marine life that would be and it's only one tiny country normally known for drinking tea! Imagine the whole of the world's rubbish going into the ocean, an ocean which I hate to mention, provides half of the earths oxygen and is our biggest protein supermarket.
In this documentary, which I really do suggest that you watch, they featured countless stories of species and marine life in danger simply due to plastic. One if the ones that stuck with me was the research of a type of sea bird, the scientist picked a dead chick off of the beach and cut into its tummy, I couldn't quite believe what I was seeing. This 90 day old chick's tummy was rock solid and when she opened it up you found out that it was jammed packed with plastic. Similarly, they showed clips of a dying whale screeching in pain; it was dying of starvation and malnutrition because 6 square feet of plastic sheeting was stuck in its edges time system. Do I need to say anymore?
All of the plastic that we use daily goes eventually goes into the sea, think about what goes in your rubbish bin, I know that in my family our non recycling bin fills up far faster than the recyclable one and the main culprit is packaging. Packaging in food, cosmetics, amazon orders literally every thing. The worst part it plastic doesn't degrade for tens of thousands of years, it breaks down into tiny tiny pieces called micro plastics and eventually nano plastics. With pieces so small you can see how it ends up in sea creature's tummies. It blocks the animals internal pathways and if they don't die a horrible death from literal starvation as nothing can pass through they will die of suffocation or even poisoning from the toxins that pass into their blood stream. The ocean is home to 230,000 known species that are suffering from excruciatingly painful deaths.
It isn't just marine life that's suffering, islands around the world which used to be sunny paradises are being ruined by plastic, their inhabitants have no deposit system for the plastic that they use so they just live with it. The documentary showed shocking clips of people living in a pit of rubbish, huts in a sea of plastic. Children who rummage through land fills for a living, people being poisoned by the affects of the toxins from the degrading plastic surrounding them. You can't quite imagine it until you actually see it.
Okay, enough lecturing, I could go on about it for ages. I'm not suggesting that we all stop using plastic over night, or even that we do at all. I don't know how I would survive! But just to keep it in the fore front of your mind and stop yourself when your going to put cling film on something or pay 5p for a plastic bag. It's just not worth it.
In this documentary, which I really do suggest that you watch, they featured countless stories of species and marine life in danger simply due to plastic. One if the ones that stuck with me was the research of a type of sea bird, the scientist picked a dead chick off of the beach and cut into its tummy, I couldn't quite believe what I was seeing. This 90 day old chick's tummy was rock solid and when she opened it up you found out that it was jammed packed with plastic. Similarly, they showed clips of a dying whale screeching in pain; it was dying of starvation and malnutrition because 6 square feet of plastic sheeting was stuck in its edges time system. Do I need to say anymore?
All of the plastic that we use daily goes eventually goes into the sea, think about what goes in your rubbish bin, I know that in my family our non recycling bin fills up far faster than the recyclable one and the main culprit is packaging. Packaging in food, cosmetics, amazon orders literally every thing. The worst part it plastic doesn't degrade for tens of thousands of years, it breaks down into tiny tiny pieces called micro plastics and eventually nano plastics. With pieces so small you can see how it ends up in sea creature's tummies. It blocks the animals internal pathways and if they don't die a horrible death from literal starvation as nothing can pass through they will die of suffocation or even poisoning from the toxins that pass into their blood stream. The ocean is home to 230,000 known species that are suffering from excruciatingly painful deaths.
It isn't just marine life that's suffering, islands around the world which used to be sunny paradises are being ruined by plastic, their inhabitants have no deposit system for the plastic that they use so they just live with it. The documentary showed shocking clips of people living in a pit of rubbish, huts in a sea of plastic. Children who rummage through land fills for a living, people being poisoned by the affects of the toxins from the degrading plastic surrounding them. You can't quite imagine it until you actually see it.
Okay, enough lecturing, I could go on about it for ages. I'm not suggesting that we all stop using plastic over night, or even that we do at all. I don't know how I would survive! But just to keep it in the fore front of your mind and stop yourself when your going to put cling film on something or pay 5p for a plastic bag. It's just not worth it.
Plastic is such a big issue at the moment but still not many people seem to care. Doing things like not getting straws/plastic bottles, buying from eco friendly shops and using durable shopping bags can make a difference.
ReplyDeleteYeah there is so many easy things that we can do but people just don't seem to actually change anything!
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