Ever think that when you throw away a plastic bag or plastic bottle, you are killing our planet or something living on our planet? Well, you probably are. Living in a plastic packaged world, the damage to our planet is becoming more and more obvious. Being a somewhat educated planet person myself, I was still shocked by what was happening in our oceans, and this TED talk, by Charles Moore, put some perspective on it.
Did you know that 2 million plastic bottles are used every five minutes in the United States?
While participating in a yachting competition, Charles Moore discovered a huge swath of floating plastic garbage the size of two Texases. Even worse, all of the garbage is trapped in an enormous, slow whirlpool called the Pacific Gyre. Moore once said, "There were shampoo caps and soap bottles and plastic bags and fishing floats as far as I could see. Here I was in the middle of the ocean, and there was nowhere I could go to avoid the plastic". The 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch' in some places can outweigh the surface biomass six-to-one! For example, in the Pacific Gyre, a sample was taken to count plankton, but more plastic was found than plankton.
What is this effecting? Besides the obvious answer, which would be the ocean, it is effecting the birds and sea creatures also. Hundreds of thousands of birds and fish are dying with mainly plastic products filling their stomachs. The floating caps of plastic bottles are easily mistaken for bird food and the flying animals are dying because of it.
"But there's recycling now", you might say. The scientific amount of plastic we recycle is diddly point squat. Compared to the amount of plastics we throw away, the amount recycled is close to nothing!
So how do we fix this? Since straining the ocean of plastics would be far too expensive for any country, and could cause unforeseeable damage to aquatic life, our best bet is to not use so much plastic. If you have to use plastic, reuse it! Anything you can do to stop throwing away so much plastic will help repair our planet for a brighter future.
Obviously, I think what is happening to our ocean is a HUGE deal, but right now, I'm not seeing a whole lot of effort coming to help stop all the damage to our environment. Since the issue of using too much paper has floated to the surface, I have seen an increase of people voting for plastic over paper. But this change doesn't help our planet any more than before. We need to find a way to stop using paper AND plastic... or at least make them more recyclable.
I guess the real question is how do we stop the damage from paper AND plastic? Is there a solution?
To watch this TED talk, click here: http://www.ted.com/talks/capt_charles_moore_on_the_seas_of_plastic.html
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