You’d better mind your waste because
it’s not piling up in landfills anymore.
Today, we're going to dump it all
straight into the oceans.
Look, there already is a lot of trash in our oceans.
But YOU can change that.
Remember how the internet banded together
to raise 20 million dollars to plant 20 million trees
in the TeamTrees initiative?
Well, it's time we did something for our seas.
All you have to do is visit teamseas.org,
where you can clean one pound of trash
from the ocean for just $1.
And if you don't have a dollar to spare,
well, you can get the word out by sharing this video.
Let's get 30 million pounds of trash out of the oceans together!
Because the alternative...
Well, it's dim.
We, humans,
produce a lot of waste in a year.
2.1 billion tons, to be precise.
There’s household waste.
And every second, we throw away
60 tons of household trash globally.
As new technologies are developed,
50 million tons of electronic waste
piles up every year
And there’s always good old plastic.
Most plastic materials could take centuries to degrade.
And there’s already a massive pile of it
floating around in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
This is a collection of marine debris in the North Pacific Ocean
mostly consisting of small pieces of plastic.
And every year, 8.8 million tons of plastic
ends up here or in other parts of our oceans.
How much bigger would this Great Pacific Garbage Patch get
if we dumped all of our trash in there?
If you grabbed all the waste humans produced in a year
and rolled it up,
you’d be looking at a giant ball that
weighs as much as 5,500 Empire State Buildings.
That’s a shocking amount of trash.
And that’s a whopping 25,000 times more massive
than the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
And this patch already covers
a distance of 1.6 million square km (610,000 square mi).
To put it in perspective,
with the trash we produce in one year,
we could cover the surface of the planet 80 times.
If all this waste accumulated in the oceans,
it would ruin some marine life.
If we completely covered our oceans in trash,
no sunlight would be able to penetrate that shield.
This would deplete our oxygen levels
and affect the health of marine animals.
It would disturb the ooceans’ invisible forest.
These are the bacteria that are responsible for
generating 10% of the oxygen you breathe.
Losing them would have terrible ripple effects
on ecosystems around the world.
All this waste would also transport
many kinds of chemical pollutants all over the world.
Some of these toxic compounds
would stay in the ocean for decades.
These are known as persistent,
bioaccumulative and toxic compounds,
commonly referred to as PBTs.
They are dangerous for their ability
to make their way up the food chain.
Think about a little fish swimming in water
with a high mercury concentration.
That little fish gets eaten by a bigger fish just passing through.
Then that big fish is caught, and by consuming that big fish,
you'd get more mercury in your body.
And it wouldn't only happen to you.
Some marine animals like whales
would pass on these toxins from generation to generation.
This would weaken their immune systems
and even affect their reproduction.
Beyond the oceans being a truly ugly sight,
there would be many human consequences to all this as well.
Chemicals and heavy metals from electronics waste
would affect your central nervous
and reproductive systems.
You may already have microplastics inside your body.
These are plastic particles that are smaller than 5 mm (0.2 in).
One study found microplastics in the stool samples
of every human subject they studied.
So you already have plastic in you.
Now, you’d have to get used to having more.
At this point, there would be more trash in the sea than fish.
You’d see many species go extinct.
Maybe you’d even go to your local seafood market
to find they don't sell any fish.
Only jellyfish.
Um, I don't know if I want to try that.
Hopefully, you’d pull the plug on a project like this.
Our waste management has some deeply rooted problems
that wouldn't be solved by dumping more trash into the ocean.
Maybe there’s a better place to dump all that trash.
Like volcanoes.
But that’s a story
for another WHAT IF.