Plastic Pollution: You Are What You Eat
People’s overuse of plastic products is affecting our oceans, killing wildlife and impacting our health.
APRIL 26, 2018
Currently there are over 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic filling our oceans, killing marine life and hurting public health. By the year 2050 there will be more plastic particles in the ocean than fish. This is detrimental to the food chain and will cause plastic to be digested into many animals, not just fish. People need to begin disposing of plastic properly and stop religiously using plastic products because despite being able to recycle plastic, little particles still remain, polluting our oceans and food chains.
Plastic made a big boom in the world due to it being inexpensive and disposable. It was easy and cheap for families, businesses, and franchises to use plastic products and save money. Plastic is seen as disposable but in reality whether you recycle or not, “plastic takes more than 400 years to degrade, so most of it still exists in some form. Only 12 percent has been incinerated,” writes Laura Parker, a staff writer for National Geographic. Although we know that it takes four hundred years to completely degrade we are still “…producing nearly 300 million tons of plastic…[and] more than 8 million tons of plastic is dumped into our oceans every year,” writes the Plastic Oceans Foundation, a nonprofit organization trying to clean up our beaches from plastic pollution. Not only are our oceans drowning in plastic, but it is getting into the food chain and causing health problems.
Plastic not only is found in fish, but it is also found in other aquatic animals up the food chain. Fish are towards the bottom of the food chain so fish get eaten and then it gets absorbed into that animal and so on and eventually it is absorbed into all these different animals. This causes it to be in a lot of different mammals and cause many more opportunities for it to get into a human.
If you eat fish, you are digesting all the toxins and pollutants that went into the creation of the plastic the fish ate. When a fish eats plastic they die either from infection or starvation because it blocks their digestive tract causing them to not be able to eat anything else. The plastic also absorbs into fishes muscles and once that fish either gets eaten by a human or another mammal, it is in the food chain. Plastic kills fishes and other mammals, so it is extremely unhealthy to be eating that.
Not only does eating plastic kill fish, the marine life that roams the beaches also eat plastic. In this video shared by Tess Riley, of a cow eating a plastic fishing net that was on the beach the cow is chewing on a half swallowed fishing net for 30 minutes before it was able to finally throw it up.
For anyone who loves animals or the environment, it is sickening to see how dirty and waste-filled everything is. Animals are put in disgusting, unhealthy conditions and it causes so many health problems for the public since everything is polluted. Robert Kiener, an award-winning writer, says, “whales, seals, seabirds and other marine animals die after eating floating plastic or six-pack holders.” Not only are aquatic animals affected but so are sea birds and any other animals that roam the beaches or uses the ocean as it’s source of food. In a study done by P.G. Ryan, S Jackson, seabirds who ingested plastic had lost 1% of life expectancy. This shows that it’s not only an issue for animals in the water, but animals that use the ocean as a food source.
An article on Ocean Crusaders tells us that “100,000 marine creatures a year die from plastic entanglement and these are the ones found. Approximately 1 million seabirds also die from plastic.” There are already 200 areas defined as dead zones because it is so polluted that no live organisms can grow there anymore. Plastic pollution is insanely affecting our environment in ways that are irreversible. We can’t fix it if we keep letting it happen, so we need to cut out the plastic products by simple things like switching to plastic straws. Cities like Sacramento, San Francisco and Santa Cruz have already started using paper straws and have banned plastic bags as a whole, so other states and cities should follow suit and ban them as well. As a global community we need to band together and cut out plastic products in order to clean up our environment. “Straws end up in landfills, and when improperly disposed of, oceans and waterways, where they can break down into smaller pieces that are mistaken for food by fish and other marine life,” writes Melody Gutierrez, a political reporter for the San Francisco Chronicles.
The plastic pollution in the ocean has gotten so bad that there are 5 gyres that are filled with plastic. At first it’s hard to tell that it is plastic, but when you look down deep into it you can see all the plastic floating around. “In reality, the ‘patch’ is a swirling vortex of plastic soup, an immense, fetid swamp of debris where tiny bits of decaying plastic outweigh surface zooplankton…by a ratio of six-to-one,” says Kitt Doucette, a contributing editor for Wenner Media, in a Rollings Stone article. In a study done by Keep America Beautiful they found that plastic pollution rose by 165% from 1969 to 2009. This study shows that plastic pollution is already out of hand not only in the oceans, but along the coast as well. There is enough plastic inhabiting our oceans to line every coastline in America with plastic bags, when is it going to be enough for people to realize they need to make a change in the way they consume and dispose of their products?
Plastic pollution is getting out of hand. If we don’t begin to change the way we dispose of plastic products and make a conscientious decision to cut back on plastic use then we are going to pollute our ocean in irreversible ways. I know that plastic products are still so popular and aren’t going to just get cut out completely in the blink of an eye. Change is a powerful thing but it takes time to do it. Cutting out all plastic isn’t necessarily the way to do it but something as simple as swapping out a plastic bag for a paper/cloth one or using a paper straw instead of a plastic one could help the environment in considerable ways.