Plastic: made to last forever, designed to throw away.

BANG! BANG! BANG!. My friends and I woke up still extremely fatigue from staying up late last night. We look at the clock and see thats its 4:30 am. Still 4 more hours till we were supposed to wake up. I head into the bathroom splash my face with water and change my clothes. We head outside and our teachers signaled us to be quiet and made us follow them down to the beach. There we saw many of the resort staff gathered in a circle looking at something.

When I saw what it was, my digestive system started to churn inside my body. A small baby turtle was stuck inside a plastic bag. The staff didn't waste any time. Even before we came they were already cutting through the plastic bag. Within minutes the turtle was free. They nursed him for a few weeks and let him back into the ocean.

Plastic: made to last forever, designed to throw away.

Plastic is used by all, but it’s thrown away within the same hour. Yet we have taken the convenience of this product too far. According to oceancrusaders.org, 6.4 million pounds of plastic is dumped into the ocean every year. The problem is that petroleum plastic, the type of plastic that is most commonly used in our everyday products, doesn’t biodegrade, and it takes forever to decompose.

Unfortunately thats not our biggest problem. Scientists are now starting to worry that toxics would enter the marine food chain through plastics. According to National Geographic, new studies show that plastic are biodegrading

You might wonder what actually happens to the plastic in the oceans. There are 5 gyres in the ocean. A gyre is a large system of rotating ocean currents and involve large wind movements. Gyres are caused by the Coriolis effect. Gyres act like whirlpools and pull in all the plastic from nearby places and cause them to stay there, creating massive garbage patches, such as the great pacific garbage patch

In 1998, Capt. Charles Moore discovered that the North Pacific Gyres had acquired around 18 million tons of plastic. The weight of plastic on the oceans surface was about 6 times as much as the weight of plankton. He deducted that the only reasons landfills weren’t getting filled up to the brim was that most of the plastic waste managed to get sucked into these even vaster gyres. According to 5gyres.org, 44% of all seabird species, 22% of…Cetaceans, all sea turtle species, and a growing list of fish species have been documented with plastic in or around their bodies. The plastic has caused many marine animals to suffer, due to internal blockages, dehydration, starvation and death.

Unfortunately thats not our biggest problem. Scientists are now starting to worry that toxics would enter the marine food chain through plastics. According to National Geographic, new studies show that plastic are biodegrading that plastics are now degrading faster in water. This sounds like a good thing doesn’t it? Unfortunately as they degrade in the ocean they leach potentially toxic chemicals such as bisphenol A possibly threatening the ocean animals and us. The scientist also figured out that plastic doesn’t degrade faster in hotter temperature but rather in colder temperature, meaning the deeper the plastic is in the sea the faster it will degrade. Since humans tend to consume more of the animals that live deeper in the sea, that means the toxins can now easily get into our bodies.

Yet still most people are not aware about how serious this problem is. Data shows that only 1 in every 5 people know about the gyres across the world and about the toxins in the water. When they mindlessly toss their plastic in the sea, they never realise how much damage they're actually doing to the environment.

Yet might be sitting there wondering what you can do to help end this tragedy. You should start with reducing, reusing, recycling, repurposing, refusing etc. Still if we do that many scientists fear that we there is so much plastic in the gyres already that the damage that is already done might just be too much.

According to Anthony Andrady, a senior researcher scientist there is still hope that microbes could evolve and mutate into species which can break down plastics. Unfortunately there has been no signs of that this maybe happening so until then we will have to keep hoping.

Kunal a fellow writer, also writing about plastics commented on this. “Gyres are natural water systems caused by tectonic plates moving. They can be very dangerous at times. They mostly end up sucking in plastics.” When asked about what the problem here is he stated, “The plastics are killing the ecosystems. The very fish that we eat are eating plastics before being caught in fisher nets. We’re slowly but surely going to run out of clean water at this rate.”

Can we maintain this throwaway culture. At the rate that the plastics are building up, scientists believe that in the next century we will run out of clean water. Unless we start acting, our precious planet will go into an uninhabitable state for most living beings. So act now, and start saving the planet by reusing your plastic bags, and only using plastic which biodegrades.

By Roshan