Plastic Pollution
 

         Plastic. It is one of the most common and widespread materials used for many purposes in our society. It is used for packaging, building and construction, household and sports equipment, vehicles, electronics and agriculture. It’s cheap, lightweight, strong and ductile. About 300 million tons of plastic are produced every year, half of which are used to make items such as shopping bags, straws, and cups. However, there is one unequivocal fact! Although plastic is a cheap, efficient and useful material, it has proven to be catastrophic for the health of humans, wildlife, and marine and terrestrial ecosystems.

Due to the resistant nature of most plastics, being synthetic organic polymers, they can not decompose or break down chemically. Once they are left in the environment, they will stay there and cause harm for about 450 years, only breaking down into smaller and smaller particles of plastic! What makes this feature of plastic even worse is taking into consideration the sheer quantity of plastic that is currently polluting our planet. As mentioned before, humans today produce about 300 million tons of plastic waste every year, which is nearly the equivalent to the weight of the entire human population! Furthermore, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, about 8 million tons of plastic are ending up in our oceans every year! To add to the severity of this dilemma, it is also known that plastic waste has been detected on each and every single shoreline of all the continents in the world, making it amongst the most, if not the most, widespread forms of pollution that currently exist on our planet! Disgusting!

Now, you may ask, how exactly does plastic debris find its way into our oceans and water systems? Well, the main sources of marine plastic are land-based. This means that they come from urban and storm runoff, sewer overflows, beach visitors, inadequate waste disposal and management, industrial activities, construction, and illegal dumping. But not all plastic pollution is land-based. There is also ocean-based plastic pollution, which originates from the fishing industry, nautical activities and aquaculture. 

Plastic pollution has caused a wide range of environmental problems, one of those being its threat to the safety and health of marine biodiversity. Yes, you heard that right! Our planet's incredible marine mammals and seafood are being severely impacted! According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, under the influence of solar UV radiation, wind, currents and other natural factors, large plastic material fragments into small particles known as microplastics. Consequently, because there is just so much plastic in the ocean, something known as the Great Pacific garbage patch has formed. It is essentially a patch created by plastic debris and other trash from around the world that is brought together by ocean currents. The best way to imagine how this looks in the ocean is by picturing a “soup” of tiny plastic pieces mostly below the water’s surface. Now, the problem with microplastics is that they create toxic chemicals that marine wildlife swim in. The animals soak up these toxic chemicals and allow for a process called biomagnification. Biomagnification is the increased concentration of a substance, in this case a toxic chemical from plastic, in the tissues of organisms of successively higher levels in a food chain, damaging the entire wildlife ecosystem. However, there are not just microplastics in the ocean. There is also a significant presence of larger plastic debris that hundreds of thousands of marine animals either get entangled in or ingest, ultimately leading to awful deaths.

There may be people out there who say, “Well too bad animals are dying as a result of me using plastic, but it doesn't affect me so who cares.” However, this ignorant way of thinking is actually very far from reality. Plastic pollution has a variety of effects on us. It has a direct impact on our food and health. If I told you that the plastic you discard could somehow find its way back into the food you eat or water you drink, would you still purchase or not recycle plastic? I hope your answer is no! If you can recall when we discussed biomagnification, you can understand how plastic could find its way back to you through your seafood. The accumulation of toxic chemicals up the food chain will inevitably cause the marine predators, or the majority of the fish we eat, to have the highest concentrations of toxic chemicals in their tissues. And that will all be ingested by you. You want to know something crazier? Traces of “invisible” plastic, or tiny nanoparticles of plastic, have actually been found in tap water, beer and salt! And I am pretty sure we all consume that more often than not. Consequently, all of these traces of plastic we are ingesting from seafood or water are bound to have negative effects on our health. According to the article “Plastic Pollution” by Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser, several chemicals used in the production of plastic materials are actually known to interfere with the body’s endocrine system, causing developmental, reproductive, neurological, and immune disorders in humans, as well as wildlife. I don't know about you, but if I could prevent myself or my loved ones from experiencing these horrible health effects by limiting my plastic use, I definitely would!

The good news is, we can absolutely do something about the increasing amounts of plastic pollution ending up in our earth’s oceans. As consumers, we have control over the market of plastic products, and we can steer our future into a more sustainable one by buying products from, and supporting, plastic-alternative companies. We can also do a better job of reusing and recycling plastic to keep it from being discarded and becoming debris. And yes, your actions do make an impact!