Earth Day — End plastic pollution
On Sunday April 22, Earth Day celebrated its 48th year of drawing awareness to environmental issues with this year’s theme of ending plastic pollution. Plastic is wonderful and awful because it’s durable.
It can take up to a thousand years for sunlight to make plastic brittle enough to break down. These microplastic particles the size of plankton are ingested by marine life which we eat. Plastic has entered our food chain.
The American Museum of Natural History’s video compares the environmental status of the earth today to when Earth Day started back in 1970. The population has doubled from 3.7 billion to 7.6 billion. Plastic production has increased 15 times from 30 million tons in 1970 to 435 million this year. A United Nations report said that of the hundreds of millions of tons of plastic that were produced last year, half of it was used once and then thrown away. This is equivalent to a large garbage truck backing up and dumping plastic into the ocean every minute of every day.
Over half of the sea turtle population has been injured or killed by plastic that blocks breathing passages and their stomachs. It’s estimated that 90% of seabirds have swallowed plastic. By the year 2050, it is predicted that the amount of plastic by weight in the ocean will equal that of fish.
For every person on the planet there is about one ton of plastic trash. This huge problem can begin to be tackled in small steps such as skipping the straw. The Ocean Conservancy estimates approximately10 million plastic straws have been picked up off of beaches.
While ordering drinks without the straw won’t solve the problem, it can increase the awareness of how menacing plastic can be for marine life and might cause people to consider other ways to reduce waste.
When taking out the trash, do you wonder where that waste goes? The green triple arrow triangle that has come to represent reduce, reuse and recycle is increasing awareness, but landfills continue to fill up.
Closed Loop Partners is working with third world countries to help address the plastic waste from single use packaging by making more packaging recyclable. They also assist waste pickers by connecting them to markets that recycle the plastic bottles they collect.
David Katz’s TED Talk explained that 80% of ocean plastic is collecting in countries that are the poorest so he started The Plastic Bank where impoverished people can earn a living by collecting plastic garbage which is then sorted, shredded and sold. The value is transferred into an online account that can be used to buy cooking fuel and school tuition.
Marcus Eriksen of One World One Ocean said that it’s impractical to scoop the trash out of the ocean to clean it, but rather the efforts should be placed on cleaning up the beaches where it washes ashore.
Boyan Slat, CEO of The Ocean Cleanup, disagrees. He has spent five years using iterative engineering to design a cleanup solution. After an aerial survey of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, one of five gyres or whirlpool accumulation zones of trash twice the size of Texas, they built a collection machine to extract the plastic which will be stored and shipped to shore.
Global efforts will be needed to counter the negative effects of plastic pollution. Help rewrite the story and make a change by skipping the straw, recycling your plastic bottles, bringing your own cloth grocery bags, and picking up trash rather than littering. Be a part of the solution rather than the pollution. Together we will decide what earth looks like.