Here are some of the worst effects plastic has on us and our planet!
10 - The Great Pacific Garbage Patch The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the largest
of the five offshore plastic accumulation zones in the world’s oceans.
It’s located halfway between Hawaii and California.
It’s estimated that 1.15 to 2.41 MILLION tons of plastic are entering the ocean each
year from rivers.
The stronger, more buoyant plastics show resilience in the marine environment, allowing them to
be transported over extended distances.
The trash persist at the sea surface as they make their way offshore, transported by converging
currents and finally accumulating in the patch.
Once these plastics enter the patch, they’re unlikely to leave the area until they degrade
into smaller microplastics under the effects of sun, waves, and marine life.
The center of the garbage patch has the highest density of trash and the further boundaries
are the least dense.
That definitely makes sense right?!
9 - Whose Pollution?
It turns out that five countries are the leading contributors to this crisis.
And all are in Asia.
In a recent report, Ocean Conservancy claims that China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand,
and Vietnam are spewing out as much as 60 percent of the plastic waste that enters the
world’s seas.
So how did a few Asian countries, many of them comparatively poor, end up churning out
much of the plastic waste that swirls around the seas?
As Asian economies rise, people have more cash to blow on Marlboros and Sprites at 7-Eleven.
But the junk these habits produce often doesn’t end up in legit landfills.
In the five Asian countries listed above, only about 40 percent of garbage is properly
collected.
Across Asia, trash is often piled up in communal dumps where stray bits are swept up by the
wind and cast into the ocean.
Even sanctioned garbage dump sites are supposedly sometimes intentionally set up near rivers
that flow into the sea.
Apparently, the owners of these dumps are hoping that the waste will intermittently
be carried away by heavy rains or current, refreshing the capacity of the dump to receive
more waste.
8 - Birds Between entanglement, ingestion, and marine
ecosystem damage, the threat of plastic pollution impacts marine species both large and small
— but let’s not forget our friends in the sky.
Scientists have been tracking plastic ingestion by seabirds for decades.
In 1960, plastic was found in the stomachs of fewer than 5 percent of birds, but by 1980,
that number had jumped to 80 percent.
For example, the Albatross is severely affected by the human-created plastics problem.
One might argue that it’s intensified because of the way albatross catch their food.
They skim the surface of the water with their beak and along the way, they mistakenly pick
up a lot of floating plastic.
This plastic is then fed to their chicks.
Adults can regurgitate plastic they’ve swallowed, but chicks are unable to, so it fills up their
stomachs.
New generations of albatross chicks are struggling to survive because of starvation from being
filled with plastic or critical damage that occurs to their gastrointestinal tracts.
The highest concentration of plastic in birds can be found in populations in southern Australia,
South Africa, and South America -- where coastlines are closest to loosely-concentrated collections
of ocean debris in the southern Pacific, southern Atlantic, and Indian Oceans.
7 - Rivers Our seas are choking on plastic.
A staggering eight MILLION metric tons wind up in oceans every year, and unraveling exactly
how it gets there is critical.
A recent study estimates that more than a quarter of all that waste could be pouring
in from just 10 rivers, eight of them in Asia.
The results found by Environmental Science & Technology, show that rivers collectively
dump anywhere from 0.47 million to 2.75 million metric tons of plastic into the seas every
year, depending on the data used in the models.
10 rivers carry 93 percent of trash.
The Yangtze, Yellow, Hai, Pearl, Amur, Mekong, Indus and Ganges Delta are in Asia.
The Niger and Nile Rivers are in Africa.
The Yangtze river alone dumps up to an estimated one and a half million metric tons of plastic
waste into the Yellow Sea!
These rivers all have two things in common.
One is the generally high population living in the surrounding region and the other is
less than ideal waste management processes in place around the rivers.
The Yangtze is Asia’s longest river and is also one of world’s biggest carriers
of plastic pollution to the ocean.
6 - Human Health Plastics can be made from a selection of many
different chemicals, depending on the application.
Many of these substances aren’t bound to the chemical chain of the plastic, which means
that they can migrate under different circumstances as small as a change in temperature or light.
Toxic ingredients can evaporate into the air and be breathed in.
They can readily absorb into the skin.
These chemicals can leach into food or drink and then be ingested.
Let’s see, what are some examples?
Breathing near plastic trash being burned, opening a new plastic item that releases a
strong odor, drinking hot coffee from a Styrofoam cup, reusing a water bottle, or eating food
microwaved in a plastic container.
Any of these common practices allow chemicals from plastic to migrate easily into our body.
Plastic comes in many forms but there’s general consensus that while while plastics
are essential to our daily lives, there are serious concerns about its effects on human
health.
5 - Microplastic and Ocean Life Microplastics come from a variety of sources,
including from larger plastic debris that degrades into smaller and smaller pieces.
In addition, microbeads, a type of microplastic, are very tiny pieces of manufactured polyethylene
plastic that are added as exfoliants to health and beauty products, such as soap and toothpastes.
These tiny particles easily pass through water filtration systems and end up in the ocean
and Great Lakes, posing a potential threat to aquatic life.
Microplastic debris floating in the world’s oceans could be having a massive impact on
marine life.
Tiny bits of plastic are having an impact on lugworms, which are an important source
of food for many animals.
If ocean sediments are heavily contaminated with microplastics, marine lugworms eat less
and their energy levels suffer.
Also, ingesting microplastic can also reduce the health of lugworms by delivering harmful
chemicals.
Ingesting the tiny particles can prevent some animals from consuming their natural prey,
leading to starvation.
4 - Bisphenol A Bisphenol A, or BPA, is a chemical used to
make plastics.
More precisely, BPA is used to harden plastics, keep bacteria from contaminating foods, and
prevent cans from rusting.
It’s widely used in sports equipment, water bottles, medical devices, and as a coating
in food and beverage cans.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found measurable amounts of BPA in the bodies
of more than 90 percent of the U.S. population studied.
The highest estimated daily intakes of BPA occur in infants and children.
BPA is more likely to leach out of plastic when its temperature is increased, such as
when someone warms up food in the microwave or warms up a baby bottle.
In 2012, the FDA banned the use of BPA in baby bottles, after several large manufacturers
had already voluntarily removed it.
Before the voluntary removal and the ban, most plastic baby bottles contained BPA.
But even with the ban in baby bottles, two recent studies show that newborns are still
being exposed to the chemical.
Infants may be exposed to BPA before they’re born because of the exposures to BPA by their
moms!
3 - Recycling Of the 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic
that’s been estimated to have been produced, an estimated 6.3 billion metric tons has become
plastic waste.
Only 9% of the waste has been recycled.
The vast majority is accumulating in landfills or in the natural environment as litter.
In order to tackle the waste problem, we either don’t use plastic, or we figure out better
recycling methods.
Many people are often confused by the terms, “break down” versus “biodegradable”.
When plastics are broken down, this means one large piece of plastic is reduced into
a bunch of smaller pieces of plastic.
These smaller pieces of plastic can be consumed by smaller animals, but obviously they’re
still indigestible.
A minority of plastics are “biodegradable”, which means they can be reduced to their chemical
components by, say, your home compost.
Other plastics can only be successfully composted by industrial or municipal facilities after
first being separated from other, non-biodegradable, plastics.
Unfortunately, most people are confused as to which plastics fall into which category,
along with the fact that some areas don’t make it convenient to recycle, so many people
ultimately don’t recycle at all.
2 - Sea Turtles To sea turtles, a plastic bag looks like a
tasty jellyfish.
A lost fishing net might look like some harmless seaweed.
Because of this confusion, plastic causes roughly a thousand marine turtle passings
each year.
They can lead to a number of environmental problems.
Plastics are especially dangerous for marine animals, as they can become entangled or they
can accidentally ingest plastic while feeding.
Digestive tracts can become blocked, which can lead to starvation.
Plastic straws can also end up in a turtle’s nose, obviously blocking breathing.
Sea turtle buoyancy disorders, commonly referred to as “bubble butts,” are also a growing
issue.
This condition is often caused by trapped gas inside the turtle’s digestive system.
The harmful decomposition of marine debris is believed to be the cause of many of these
cases.
Sea turtles that cannot properly submerge in water will have trouble feeding and become
more vulnerable to boat strikes, predation and entanglements.
1 - Plastic Straws
You guys have heard about the plastic straw ban right?
Because of their size, plastic straws can literally slip through the cracks when going
through the recycling process.
They often end up in the ocean, where they can do damage to sea creatures who mistake
them for food, such as the sea turtles we were talking about earlier.
And when straws aren’t recycled, they wind up in landfills.
Plastic lids, while not ideal, are much easier to recycle.
Even if you're not a big straw drinker, the problem is big— according to an estimate
by the National Park Service, Americans use millions of straws every single day.
As more attention is paid to the issue, companies and cities have taken strides to reduce the
amount of straws used each day.
Disney already announced plans to eliminate single-use plastic straws and plastic stirrers
at all owned and operated locations across the world by mid-2019.
Seattle became the first major US city to ban single-use plastic straws and utensils.
San Francisco followed with an ordinance that's expected to take effect in 2019.
Starbucks announced a move to get rid of plastic straws globally by 2020.
Starbucks will switch to compostable straws to be given to customers upon request.
McDonald's has set a goal to shift 100% of guest packaging to renewable or recycled
sources by 2025.
Here’s what’s next!