Plastic: A Diseased Ocean
Over the last several decades the attention of the public as been brought to the issues of enviromentalism. Be it through politics, charity, school or news the issue of howe badly damaged our planet is as a result of our decisions. We all do our little bit to help. But very little do we realise how often we are doing the opposite. Its hard to keep on top of the damage when we dont even realise how big some of the issues are. An example of this is how often we use and throw away single use plastics.
On the daily we are all known for using something that is made of a single use plastic be it a bottle of water or a packaging of food. But we often dont think about what buying these things actually does. Sure we throw the waste into recyling bins but a large amount of all “recycled” plastic is actually recycled with a staggering 78% of the plastic we recycle just going to land fills, and thats in the UK alone. The life cycle of single use plastics is very cut and dry, with most of it just being thrown away once it reaches the recycle stage, if it even makes it there.
As seen in the graphic abaove over the last 60 years (as of 2015) that over half of plastics were just thrown away or burned. This is the problem as there is plastic just piling up in landfills around the world and going on to effect the enviroment.
The effect of single use plastics has had a massive impact on the worlds sea life. The ammount of our plastics that end up in our oceans is massive. A large majority of the world’s plastic waste ends up in the ocean, with catostrophic effects.
On a annual basis an average of 9.84 million tonnes of plastic, with 1.33 million of that being micro plastics, end up in the ocean. These micro plastics do damage to larger sea life, such as whales, dolphins and sharks, as they are further up the food chain they eat the smaller fush that would eat the micro plastic and as a result digest them and become unhealthy as a result of the micro plastics being in their system.
That is only the damage done by micro plastics. Larger plastics have an entirley different but just as profound effect on ocean life. Nylon fishing nets are often lost at sea when people are out fishing and they often float until they entrap sea life. Often the nets end up tying up and injuring or killing about 640,000 animals, including sea turtles, whales, and dolphins each year.
Plastic effect in the world is exponential and frankly its quite disustting. I plan on using my website to inform on the issues i have explained here as well as ways that people can help and include links to other organisations who help with the damage of single use plastics.
