Do Plastics End Up In A Landfill?

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The exorbitant amount of waste humans all around the world are producing each and every day is astonishing. In major developed cities, trash is easily forgotten about due to the lack of an impact it plays on peoples' lives after it is disposed of (Lohuizen 2017). Furthermore, the problem is expected to grow; as nations begin to develop, trash will shortly follow. Packaging for items uniquely becomes more intricate as a nation develops, and as a result plays a critical role in how much total garbage actually ends up in a landfill. A culprit to the landfill problem is plastics, due to the extraordinary amount of time it takes for them to degrade. Even when they are recycled, plastics end up, in some way or another, inside a landfill. Because …show more content…

Not to mention, the plastics that do not end up in that middle area; many end up being swallowed by a fish and never fully get broken down, causing health problems for the fish and anyone who consumes it. Humans' addiction to everything plastic has been negatively effecting ecosystems everywhere. Once plastics becomes small enough to be virtually unrecognizable, they can find their way to anywhere on this Earth. With no foresight to the landfill problem, and a constant flow of garbage entering into landfills, we will surely be seeing exponential negative effects all across every biome. If no immediate action is taken to reduce the amount of garbage produced daily, or we cannot find any long-term solution to dealing with an increase of trash, we will be stuck in an Earth filled not with green, but …show more content…

Landfills are outright destroying the beauty of this planet, making our land look terrible, all while inhabitants of this planet suffer. Research could be the savior to our trash problem. We need an organism that can complete this food cycle. The problem is our trash is stuck in a stationary phase, remaining to be degraded for years at a time. We need to genetically manipulate an organism to become our missing link in decomposing this trash. By using new forms of technology, like gene cutting at the nucleotide level, we could hypothetically engineer an organism that could turn our once non-decomposable material into a safe byproduct. Of course, if it were that simple, it would be done already. With our current garbage situation in mind, we need to make it a priority to recycle plastics when possible, creating less overall

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