According to Statcan (September 26, 2014), Canada’s population is 35,540,400. If each Canadian in Canada drinks at least one bottle of water per day, there is 35,540,400 bottles of water to be discarded. How do we Canadians get rid of all the water bottles? Some Canadians dispose of them properly; while others dispose of them incorrectly As well as many Canadians also choose to reuse the water bottles, believing that is the best option. Reusing a water bottle is very unsafe because of the plastic. Reality is, drinking a disposable water bottle is the worst. Disposable water bottles cause a threat to all. Humans face the threat of chemicals dissolving into the water bottle, which will harm our health if the bottle is not stored properly. Water bottles can also lead to a global problem; global warming. Global warming is a huge problem all around the world. If we are able minimize greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, we could be helping …show more content…
Every day we hear about our friends dying. “The ocean is like a soup of plastic mostly composed of fragments invisible to the human eyes, killing life and affecting dangerously our health." (Fidenci, 2011). Marine animals are eating plastic instead of their actual food. A decline of many species is occurring and this is affecting the food chain. We humans that are producing plastic bottles of water and dumping it in the ocean are affecting the life under water ecosystem. Many species will be facing extinction if we do change what we are doing. “Hundreds of thousands of sea turtles, whales, and other marine mammals, and more than 1 million seabirds die each year from ocean pollution and ingestion or entanglement in marine debris” (seeturles, 2014). Is this fair to our friends? These animals are important to the chain of life. We need to help them, by reducing the amount of plastic water bottles being used here in Canada. Enough damage has been done. We are now responsible to make a
Plastic water bottles are very unhealthy for our environment. First off, it causes Greenhouse Gas Emissions because of their use of fossil fuels. The Pacific Institute claims that the manufacturing of plastic water bottles uses about 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide. One effect of greenhouse gas emissions is that they cause global warming, the cause of the ice caps melting and ruining arctic animal’s habitats. Plastic water bottles waste a lot of energy. They’re using energy while being manufactured, treated, filled with water, keeping the water cold and while being shipped. The Pacific Institute estimates that just making the plastic bottles for American
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 &
Recently, an uninhabited island in the South Pacific Ocean was found to be polluted with 38 million pieces of plastic that had been carried over by currents (Wang, “No one lives on this remote Pacific island”). The island, dubbed ‘trash island’, is home to diverse animal populations that have all been devastated by the pollution. On the beach, hundreds of birds were seen dead by reporters and scientists. When analyzed, the primary cause of death turned out to be consumption of plastic. When animals ingest plastic, it clogs their stomach and poisons their body with toxic chemicals. These toxic chemicals cause an array of issues, such as reproductive and endocrine problems. Eventually, this leads to death (Knoblauch, “The environmental toll of plastics”). But due to the nature of plastics, it can take hundreds or even thousands of years to completely degrade, meaning that as plastic pollution continues to build up, more places like ‘trash island’ will be discovered. According to conservation scientist Alex Bond, “…[The island] is just an indicator of what’s floating around out there” (Wang, “No one lives on this remote Pacific
“Solutions to Plastic Pollution in our ocean” Natural Resources Defense Council. 3 March 2014. web 20 April 2014http://nrdc.org/oceans/plastic-ocean/default.asp
Notably, water bottles are actually very harmful to our environment for a plethora of reasons. First there size, water bottles take up tons of space in our landfills when we could be recycling them. Every 5 minutes 4 football fields are filled up with water bottles this creates major problems for landfills and makes it so landfills have to take up more precious space in our earth. Next water bottles take up tons of oil to make then we also have to
Every time you eat fish, you are eating small pieces of plastic. According to Ocean Plastic Pollution, “Fish in the North Pacific ingest 12,000 to 24,000 tons of plastic each year, which can cause intestinal injury and death and transfers plastic up the food chain to bigger fish and marine mammals. A recent study found that a quarter of fish at markets in California contained plastic in their guts, mostly in the form of plastic microfibers.” Our ocean is being polluted with plastics and it is affecting the environment. This is serious problem because marine life and ecosystems are being affected by this problem which was caused by us.
We are living on a plastic planet. Starting from the air that we breathe, the food that we eat, and the soil that we live on, plastic is everywhere. It may be hard to believe that a substance that was made for convenience would turn into a product that could ultimately destroy our planet. Plastic is a non-biodegradable material that has been mass produced for our convenience since the 1950’s. Today, over 8 million tons of plastic is dumped into the ocean each year and is estimated to increase to 800 million tons by the year 2025. The film “A Plastic Ocean” uncovers the plastic issue that is ever so prevalent in today’s world and shines a light on the reality of what we as humans are doing to our oceans.
The US Container Recycling Institute estimates that 67 million plastic water bottles are discarded every day, enough plastic water bottles to wrap around the planet 149 times each year. Indeed, plastic water bottles should be banned from use by the public. The usage of water bottles should be suppressed because they are unimaginably dangerous, wasteful, expensive, and rarely recycled.
Around eight million of plastic ends up in oceans from land each year. A water bottle that ends up in the ocean, takes about 450 years to decompose. The tons of plastic that end up in the ocean, stay there for a long time. Marine scientists have discovered, plastic is killing coral reefs. Scientists have studied 159 coral reefs for 4 years in 4 countries, Australia, Thailand, Indonesia, and Myanmar. The study shows that the coral reefs are excessively contaminated with plastic. When plastic clings to coral it sickens or kills it. When coral comes in contact with plastic the likelihood of disease increases from 4% to 89%. Plastic tears open the skin of corals, allowing an infection to start anywhere.
The author was aware that there was a problem with plastic pollution, however, did not realise that there are more than five trillion plastic pieces weighing over 250,000 tonnes floating around at sea (Erickson, Lebreton, Carson, Thiel, Moore, Borerro, Galgani, Ryan & Reisser, 2014). This figure indicates the plastic pollution in our waterways in a threat not only to sea turtles but all marine life. As a society, we are responsible for this pollution, it is our rubbish that is causing this issue. There are many organisations that are trying to encourage us to recycle, by reducing, reusing and recycling plastic (Sea Turtle Conservancy. n,d..).
The marine animals consuming plastic can affect human health. Another example is shown in McDermott’s article, “Toxins build up in the tissues of the people who eat the contaminated fish and may lead to illnesses like cancer, reproductive disorders, birth defects, and other long-term health problems,” (McDermott, “Effects of Ocean Pollution on Marine Life”). While the marine animals are consuming harmful waste, humans are hunting the animals for food. Humans will them consume the marine animals, which can lead to illness from the harmful agents the animals were exposed to. These are just examples of plastics harmful effect on bodies of water and their
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).
According to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which oversees the bottled-water industry, Americans drink more than eight billiongallons of bottled water each year. Most of that water is packaged in plastic bottles.The EPA estimates that plastics such as those used to make water bottles make up nearly 13 percent of our trash. An industry watchdog group reports that it takes nearly eighteen million barrels of oil to make the amount of plastic needed to meet Americans'thirst for bottled water. That's about the same amount of oil that a million vehicles use in one year. Oil is a nonrenewable resource—once it's gone, it's gone. Worse yet, the vehicles used to move bottled water from place to place release harmful greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Perhaps more alarming is that people recycle fewer than 20 percent of their empty bottles. Most emptybottles are tossed in the trash. From there, they end up in a landfill, where they cause further environmental damage.
Being convenient enough for everyday use and even tasting better to some, plastic bottles are a popular way of consuming beverages. They are convenient and to some people, can even taste better. However, the process of manufacturing and transporting the millions of bottles produced is detrimental to the environment. Continued use of plastic bottles could exponentially hurt the planet.
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.