Every year more than 100,000 marine mammals die from rotting stomachs and livers, caused by the animals eating trash that is in the ocean. More marine mammals die from trash consumption then from climate change. According to National Geographic, as of 2015 the calculation of 5.25 trillion pieces of trash are in the ocean. The trash covers roughly 40% of the ocean's surface. Plastic is a big part of today's world, and it is very hard to go a day without using a plastic product. The ocean gives us about 90% of our air and if the ocean died so would we and so would everything else, so is it really worth it to use a plastic bag at walmart while plastic bags are the number 1 cause to animal deaths in the ocean.
There are several Trash Gyres spread
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On the ocean floor there is approximately 4 billion microplastics per square kilometer. 35% of plastic is used once then is thrown into a landfill or ends up in the ocean, 85% of plastics are not recycled. Every time you throw out a plastic bag there is a chance that that bag ends up in the ocean and a sea turtle mistakes it for its favorite food, a Jellyfish, and slowly dies from eating a plastic bag. Not only are marine mammals at risk of dying, but seabirds are always found on beaches with exploded stomachs caused by a buildup of acid in their stomachs that come from this trash. The fish of the ocean that eat plankton usually mistake microplastics as their food, they don't die from the plastics but rather we hunt and kill them and serve them on plates all over the world. All the toxins from the plastics that the fish ingest are then consumed by the average fish eating person, which can then lead to many types of cancer. The reason that we don't really notice that plastic is slowly killing us is because we don't know what plastic is made of. According to National Geographic only 11 out of 100,000 substances in plastic have been identified. Does that make you comfortable, one of the substances you are most in contact with every day we don't even know what's inside of …show more content…
There are many reasons that won't work. First, the money part of the situation is incredible no government or organization has enough money to even make a dent in the problem, if we ignored the money problem and thought like an optimist there are more problems. Second, say we did clean it all up, in a few years it would all be there again and we would have to start over. Third, say we did stop the use of plastic and cleaned all the trash off all the surface then we would have to get the billions of pieces of trash off the bottom of the ocean, and the ocean can get to depths of upto 36,070 feet, the depth of challenger deep. Ok now say we did all of this, which is completely impossible, then we would have to deal with all the toxins in all the fish and in us. Ok so we made it this far then and just then would our problem be solved, sounds reasonable right? Some other ideas of ways to solve this problem is to completely ignore what has happened to the ocean already but focus on not doing it more. The idea of bioplastics, which are plastics made from starch, this is a completely reasonable idea but the problem is the making of these bioplastics would cut largely into our food in the world which wouldn't work because we need food more than plastic, or do
Society is highly dependent on plastic. Unfortunately, eight tonnes of plastic are thrown away every year and most ends up in the ocean. The short documentary “A Plastic Tide” looks at various places throughout the world whose beaches are littered with plastic. Mumbai, India is one of the first places the documentary focuses on. They refer to the beach as a “plastic graveyard” because there is plastic everywhere causing almost no sand to be seen. Afroz Shah began the world’s biggest beach clean and inspired community members to take action. The documentary makes sure to point out that plastic is not the problem. While plastic may be convenient for us, it is not good for marine life. It is single-use plastic that is causing the most harm. Single-use plastics are discarded within the year and only about 5% of it is effectively recycled.
Which means their obviously bad for the aquatic marine life environment & are cause many different forms of damage for them & us as one. On p.g. 23 of The New York Times upfront magazine “Birds,fish, sea turtles, & others are getting tangled in plastic bags or mistake them for food & choke”. Someone else might argue that they could the plastic bags in landfills instead of oceans. But that counter- argument is flawed because you’re just polluting by burning plastic which is bad on our part we’re not doing our part to support & taking care of the earth. Plastic in the ocean isn't just bad for plants & animals but for humans too because of the food chain some of us eat animals as a meat source such as aqua marine life like fish. If the fishermen catch fish that have been eating plastic then it's in our food supply if we eat that fish it's gonna be bad for us so many will end up getting sick from the plastic inside of the fish then what will we do our aqua marine food supply will go down the drain we couldn’t eat the fish since it's basically contaminated with plastic that we’re dumping there instead of trying to fix it & getting rid of plastic bags for good for the good of the earth. We’re causing damage towards the earth by dumping all that plastic into the ocean which damages our water supply it’ll poison us although we clean the water it depends on how big the plastic particles are, it’ll make us sick & sense it’s been lying in the oceans could bring in new pathogens &
From the very beginning of The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood constructs the world of Gilead around a central metaphor: the palimpsest. By enforcing rigid controls, Gilead has wiped away almost all forms of female freedom—reproductive rights, independence, and the choice of when and how to die—with considerable success. However, like the faint outlines of older texts on a palimpsest, hints of all these constructs and desires linger on. Atwood uses the extended metaphor of a palimpsest to illustrate freedom’s dual nature: while it can be easily eroded by fear and exploitation, it cannot be truly eradicated from the human spirit or society.
Fifty-million plastic bags enter the Australian waters every year, causing the death of thousands of sea creatures. Imagine you went on a trip to the Great Barrier Reef. As you arrive, it is clear to see garbage floating on the ocean and you can only imagine what rubbish lies beneath the surface. This disturbs me! What are we doing to our beautiful, yet innocent marine life?
The plastic apocalypse is upon us. Our oceans are currently burdened by massive expanses of floating plastic products and shreds extending farther than the eye can see in multiple locations. The biggest of these, located in the North Pacific Ocean,1 is known by many as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This dangerous collection of trash is surrounded by the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre,1 or a series of circling currents located in the Southern Hemisphere that carry plastics and other slow-degrading garbage and trap them inside its bounds.2 This specific Garbage Patch stretches from North America to Japan and the plastic-to-water ratio varies throughout.1 Because of this phenomenon, plastic is being distributed throughout oceans and deposited
People are hurting the animals, and they don’t realize it. That’s one of the issues that the people don’t realize what they are doing. All of the sea creatures about 100,000 marine animals and countless fish are being harmed by the floating plastics. Those animals die in the North Pacific every year from either eating the plastic junk or becoming ensnared, and even drowning in it. Since there is plastic in the ocean and it’s killing fish over time and from the over time it could actually make the fishes go extinct because we are throwing our garbage in the ocean, which is killing the species and affects the food chain in the ocean. Also, every people are eating plasticizing additives, drinking them, breathing them, and absorbing them through their skin every single day. Only 3 to 5 percent of plastics are recycled in any way. Which means each person tosses about 185 pounds of plastic every year. So, the plastic never really goes
Every year, an estimated 8 million tons of plastic waste enters our environment, severely polluting oceans, beaches, forests, and even the towns and cities we live in. In the ocean alone, it is believed that 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic pollutes the waters (“Plastic Statistics”, Ocean Crusaders).The majority of plastic pollution can be traced back to single-use items, such as grocery bags, bottles, and plastic packaging. According to United Nations Environment, “At the rate we are dumping items such as plastic bottles, bags and cups after a single use, by 2050 oceans will carry more plastic than fish…” (“UN Declares War on Ocean Plastic”, UN Environment). This pollution is a major problem and endangers not only the environment, but human
This pollution problem is so ubiquitous plastic can be found throughout the marine environment from coastlines to near shore lagoons to remote ocean hotspots where plastics caught up in marine currents. And gathered up into huge garbage patches that swirl
There’s more than 14 billion pounds of plastic and garbage is dumped into the oceans in the United States. Ocean pollution could be a thing of the past if people stopped littering, oil spills were prevented or contained, and if people weren’t allowed to use oil wells where natural water is. Pollution is still a major issue especially in China and Japan.
Our oceans take a large beating every day by the extremely large amount of pollution humans produce. Our society easily dumps their waste into the oceans to dispose of the excessive amount of garbage, sewage, and chemicals, but this small and simple solution is creating an even bigger problem. The way humans dispose of their wastes is causing the death of our beloved marine life. Not only are we killing off our animals, our food source, and our resources, we are also minimizing our usable water. By having a better understanding of the problem on the severe dumping, it will be easier to find ways to help minimize the pollution that is going into the ocean.
Water pollution has had devastating effects on the environment, which include irreversible effects to the oceans ecosystem. People often underestimate the importance of the ocean. They don’t realize how much damage pollution has caused to the ocean and the thousand of creatures that inhabit it. Earth is a huge place, but resources are actually very limited and will not last forever; unless there is a balance. We must protect the resources we have in order for them to last into the next generation. Every time we throw away a plastic bottle, drive our cars, and even burn those millions of fossil fuels to operate all those huge factories, there is a chance it will pollute the ocean and eventually effect the way we live. There should be stricter laws regulating human pollution, in order to protect our oceans ecosystem.
This trash came from the ocean and its currents. 269,000 tons float on the surface of the ocean; this is not even mentioning the debris that is under the waves (Laura Parker, 2015). Our world has been creating plastics faster than it ever has in the past, and this is putting our animals in danger. According to NOAA, this debris kills one million seabirds and 100,000 sea mammals each year by being mistakenly eaten or by causing injuries that may lead to death. These pieces of trash may cause strangulation, suffocation, blockage, starvation, growth deformations, and or death.
The world population is living, working, and vacationing along the coasts. They are contributing to an unprecedented tide of plastic waste. Pollution is defined as the process that alters a substance or molecule on planet earth, the pollution is caused by the physical contact of an organic decaying particle with a clean particle in the same spot, at the time the two particles join together is when occurs pollution in which the environment is greatly altered. Too many, plastic is a modern day miracle, versatile, inexpensive and durable (Rochman 2014). To others, it is a scourge, a non-degradable pollutant that threatens to choke the global environment. Plastic pollution has led to the deaths of many animals, natural resources, and people (Rochman 2014). It is time to change America’s thinking and to learn from past mistakes.
Research from the University of California San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography said that species in the ocean consume a projected 12,000 to 24,000 tons of plastic every year in the Pacific Ocean (Nall, 2014). Pollution of recyclable materials in the oceans is one of the leading causes of why some marine species are nearing extinction. Many authors of articles and books analyzing this topic tend to agree that pollution of our oceans is a problem. The future of this problem is where their ideas tend to differ. The following four literature reviews attempt to demonstrate and support my belief that pollution is getting worse in the ocean and more marine life ecosystems are being affected, but there are things that we as humans can do to change this. Imagine a world where we didn’t have to constantly worry about the vicious cycle of humans affecting animals and then animals in turn affecting us through consumption.
Although plastic bags appear to be fragile and light, their negative environmental effect is devastating. Plastic bags may cause large amounts of pollution in every step of their limited life cycle, from the extraction of raw materials, production, transportation, and recycling or disposal. Plastic bags can be defined as the most damaging form of environmental pollution. They can have a damaging effect on marine animals and wildlife in addition to the aesthetic effects on beaches, parks, and trees. Plastic bags are potentially one of the main causes of death to marine animals (Harbor keepers,2008). Up to one hundred thousand marine animals or more die each year from eating plastic bags which are mistaken for food. This can result in blocking the animal’s intestines and possibly lead to the animal’s death. Another possible situation is that wildlife, such as birds, can get tangled in plastic bags causing choking and immobility, which may eventually lead to death. (Senior, 2008) and (Citizen Campaign, 2010). In other situations, after plastic bags photo degrade they remain toxic and could be eaten by fish, shellfish or any other marine life and survive this allows the toxins to enter our food chain through bioaccumulation (Puget Soundkeeper Alliance, 2011).