Plastic Insanity
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is one of 5 major ocean regions devastated by enormous amounts of trash and is believed to be the world’s largest landfill estimated at 2 times the size of Texas. It consists of two vortexes of garbage collected by ocean currents. This gigantic accumulation of plastic was discovered by Charles Moore in 1997 when he was returning from a yacht race and decided to sail through the North Pacific Gyre
“As I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean. I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic. It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot. In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments.”
– Charles Moore
Disposable plastic is the culprit.
Single use, toss away, one-time plastic is fulfilling 5 minutes of purpose before becoming useless and incredibly harmful garbage for hundreds of years. Disposable plastic makes up 90% of the garbage in the oceans. This includes plastic bags, bottle caps, disposable water bottles, and styrofoam. Plastic never biodegrades into another substance. Plastic will always, always be plastic. Instead it photodegrades, it breaks down to smaller fragments in the presence of sunlight. It takes about 500-1000 years for plastic to photodegrade.
The Great Pacific garbage patch isn’t visible from satellites because it consists of tiny pieces of plastic that
have photo degenerated. Most of this plastic has become so small that it is invisible to the human eye. A great deal of it has become a similar size as to phytoplankton, which is the foundation of the marine food chain. Filter feeders from small fish to whales are mistaking the plastic for plankton and eating it. Larger fish who eat many of the smaller fish are getting all of the plastic from the smaller fish because their bodies cannot process plastic out. This leads to bioaccumulation of plastic and increasingly toxic animals as you move up the food chain (this is called biomagnification). As a result of biomagnification some whales and dolphins are even labeled as toxic waste.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is just one of many examples of how we are abusing our resources and destroying our planet. Since plastic and toxic chemicals from plastic are finding their way into the ocean’s food chain, we’re finding them on our dinner plates and in our bodies. Our body processes these plastics the same way it processes fat. Plastic is stored on the body as energy and when we lose fat the concentration of plastic increases because the concentration of fat decreased. Scientist are constantly discovering how toxins from plastics are disrupting the natural functioning of our bodies and the heath risks that are a product of it. A mother producing milk, which is essentially fat, is transferring the toxins from her body to her child’s through her milk.
Plastic toxicity is also said to be linked with obesity, birth defects, cancers, immune system suppression and developmental problems in the young.
The ocean also has a huge effect on our weather, temperature and overall climate and these effects could turn violently negative if we continue to consume and discarded at the rate we are now. Cleaning up the ocean manually is out of financial reach and could cause unpredictable damage to wildlife.
Together the 5 garbage patches cover 40% of our oceans
Think of all the inorganic waste we produce, every day, every week, every month, every year, All of that waste is still right here on earth. We need to stop the build up and start the clean up by changing our unsustainable practices in our everyday life. Small changes in our day-to-day routine build up, just as bioaccumulation and bio-magnification build up and make a massive difference.
You may be a conscientious recycler, but most of our recycled plastic ends up in land fills anyway. I was shocked to learn that much of it gets shipped to India, where it is turned into more cheap crap.
What is often forgotten is that it is not just the disposable plastic bottle as an end product that is damaging to our environment but the whole manufacturing process. This is because disposable plastic water bottles are made out of oil, a finite natural resource. Plastic bottles require energy to make and transport. Shocking statistics reveal that the amount of oil we use to produce water bottles each year (17 million barrels) could fuel over 1,000,000 cars for an entire year.
In the U.S. alone roughly 50 billion plastic water bottles end up in landfills each year. That equals 140 million each day. To give a clearer picture let’s imagine laying out these bottles end to end; if you were to do this you would reach China and back every single day.
On top of the pollution and the sheer nastiness of this floating plastic soup, millions of sea animals die each year from eating or getting tangled in the stuff. An autopsy performed on a dead sea turtle found over 1,000 pieces of plastic in its stomach.
There are some very interesting and informative short videos online if you google The Story of Stuff. The story of bottled water would be quite funny if it wasn’t also so very very sad. As North Americans began getting more health conscious and started to cut back on drinking bottled soft drinks, company executives went into a tizzy.
But, with an absolutely brilliantly diabolical marketing campaign, they managed to convince people that bottled water was better than tap! Even though most bottled waters are merely tap water themselves! One of the sources for Aquafina is the Detroit River! Only, of course, a bottle of Aquafina or Dasani costs two or three thousand times what tap water costs. Literally.
This has got to be one of the greatest scams ever! No wonder those fellers make the big bucks.
Ironically, we could be buying products in packages made from bio-degradable plant sources such as hemp if the petroleum industry didn’t have such a stranglehold on the planet.
The best way to fight these crimes against us and the planet and to reclaim our sovereignty is to take a cue from Gandhi and practice nonviolent resistance. Simply choose to not buy their stupid crap. Use reusable bottles. Buy products with the least packaging possible. Bring your own bags to the grocery store. Buy less stuff. Live Long & Prosper!
Stephanie Kelley
