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Why is plastic so common?
Well, it's lightweight, it's durable, and it doesn't biodegrade
or get broken down by bacteria like, say, paper does.
and while this might seem good
for transporting your soda, chips and cheese cheaply over long distances,
while keeping them fresh, there are downsides to plastics.
Durability comes with its downsides.
Once a piece of plastic is made,
it's going to hang around for hundreds of years more.
It's true that plastic things can often be recycled,
but many of them are only recycled one time before being thrown away.
Did you know that plastic is made from petroleum?
It seems weird that we would throw away something made from non-renewable resource
after only using it once or twice.
Since plastic is light,
it can be picked up by the wind and float in water.
Plastics blown into our waterways are easily moved around by waves and currents.
Around eight million tons of plastic end up in the ocean every year,
and most of it comes from land.
That's like dumping one garbage truck full of plastic
into the ocean every minute.
Wind patterns keep the ocean in motion.
Ocean currents can move a piece of debris far away from where it started.
One year after tsunami carried a teenager soccer ball off the coast of Japan,
it washed up on the beach in Alaska nearly 3,000 miles away.
Large-scale surface currents move water around ocean basins
in a circular direction.
They're called gyres.
Plastics and other trash get pulled into the middle of these gyres
and become trapped,
creating a concentrated sea of debris.
So why don't we just take a big ship out there and scoop it all up?
Remember how plastics don't biodegrade?
Well, instead they photodegrade, or get broken down into smaller pieces
by UV rays from sunlight.
Some pieces are even smaller than a grain of rice.
We call them microplastics.
Imagine throwing a huge bag of rice into an Olympic-sized swimming pool,
and then trying to get each individual grain back out again.
Now think about how much bigger the ocean is compared to a swimming pool.
In addition to being small and hard to clean up,
microplastics can absorb and release toxins,
that get into the oceans from human activities,
like farming or industry.
Plastic in the ocean affects marine life.
Whales, turtles, sea birds and fish can't often tell the difference
between real food and plastic.
For a sea turtle,
the difference between a jellyfish and a piece of plastic in the water
is almost none,
so they eat a lot of plastic thinking that it's a jellyfish.
And plastic is not nutritious so it's really bad for them.
The coral, they filter the water to get their food,
and the microplastics, they're as small as the pieces of food
that they're getting from the water get ingested by them.
The good news is we can help stop plastic trash
from even getting into the ocean in the first place.
In our community, we've supported a plastic bag ban successfully.
Almost every city in California has adopted a bag ban.
People seem to be happy to pay a little extra for a paper bag.
But most people are bringing their own bags and it's great to see it.
A lot of organizations did extensive research
on what microbeads were doing to the ocean,
and armed with that information multiple organizations got together
and created a ban.
And as of 2017,
it will be illegal to use microbeads in personal care products.
So the beach cleanup programs that the Surfrider chapter puts together
is the first step towards making a difference in this plastic issue.
We come together, we clean our beaches.
So one, we're actually getting to see first hand
what kind of plastics we have at our beaches—
whether they be cigarette butts, plastic straws, plastic water bottle caps,
and the list goes on and on.
So we actually get to do data collection,
and then doing that, as a community,
we become this strong, great force of humans
who are ready to do something to make a difference.
Waste to Waves
to collect foam like whatever you get, like a new TV or electronics,
you have all that styrofoam there.
So they actually collect the styrofoam,
and we use it to make sustainable surfboards.
But the best way we can deal with plastic is to stop using it.
Some restaurants now use biodegradable
or even compostable plastic food containers,
and maybe you've seen utensils made out of corn or potato starch
instead of petroleum.
There are some easy things that we can do to help.
We can make sure that our trash doesn't end up on the ground
and recycle whenever we can.
You can also volunteer with groups cleaning up litter,
an easy way to do some good
while having some fun in the sun with friends.
Choose things at the store that are so heavily packaged,
or package in something other than plastic.
And when you can use reusable or water bottle or grocery bag.
The actions we take in our community can have a postive impact on the world.
Wouldn't you rather swim in an ocean that looks like this?
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