Plastic Waste; A Problem to Our Environment and Ecosystem

4 months ago

If you live in underdeveloped or developing countries, you would be so shocked at how much trash find their way into the ocean, but at the end you would be shocked that it is not only in these countries that this thing happens. Around the world, about 30 million pounds of trash find its way into the ocean. For someone like me who take a lot of plastic water and plastic drinks, and I just send them to my trash can waiting for trucks to come pick them up, I do not know where this trucks dump my refuse into but there is a high chance that they find their way into the ocean. I have seen a lot of videos with people cleaning plastic waste from ocean bodies and we must confess that it is a great thing to do but is it a lasting solution?

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I always say that plastic is everywhere from cloths, phones, computers, cars, and almost everything you can think off. Plastic is a loosed term for a group of material which can either be synthetic or semi-synthetic that can be molded using heat and pressure into different shapes. Plastics are polymers which are made up of repeating chemical units forming a long chain which are a combination of carbon and hydrogen. Since its discovery in 1862, we cannot deny its impact in our industrialization and civilization.

If you read through history, you would realize that plastics were not a big deal until World War 2 where it was used for a lot of things from radar insulation, parachutes, water bottles, armored vehicles and carriage. At this points, we humans needed plastic at different variety ranging from strong, light, cheap, flexible, and still would stay for a long time and using plastics has made a lot of everyday item become more affordable and easily disposable. In all of this plastic doesn't biodegrade and this advantage has become a disadvantage over time.

When I decide to go throw a plastic bottle in a landfill, the plastic bottle is possibly going to outlive 4 generations (Myself, to my great grand kids) because it will take 450 years for it to breakdown. Also, researchers say that we could possibly have more plastics in ocean than the total amount of fishes in the year 2050 and this is possible because there is a high chance that we would be having an increased production of plastics in the coming years but currently, we have produced of 8 billion metric tons of plastic since its invention in 1862.

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When I seat and I begin to wonder why there are so much plastic around I begin to understand that recycle stations aren't available everywhere and even in countries where they are available, so many bottles don't get recycled. Like in the US, only 9% of the entire bottle being created is recycled and only 10% of the recycled plastic get turned into something that can be recycled again and this number is even small when we are talking about global recycling where only 15% of the total plastic being produced is being recycled.

Plastics are made from fossil fuels so this means that plastic problem is also a fossil fuel problem which implies that it is a greenhouse and climate problem as well. You do not believe me, why are plastic referred to as petroleum products? This is because over 90% of plastic polymers are made from fossil fuels such as oil and natural gas. Plastics in oceans travel a long way even to places where people are not living. For instance, Henderson Island in the South Pacific where there is the highest density of plastic on its shores even when people are not living there.

Over half of the world's population do not have access to proper waste management but then these countries do not dispose a lot of waste compared to countries that have waste management system like the US and other developed countries and that's because they these countries use more plastics than the countries that do not have access to waste management.

The entire system of how we use and dispose plastics needs to change because we have a complex relationship with plastic and this relationship might not change easily unless we start to do somethings like; reducing the plastics we make and use of them while creating more reusable ones. When I go to the market, I prefer using paper bag alternatives compared to plastic ones. Design more products to be more recyclable because currently not all plastics are equally recyclable.