The Threat of Plastic

                                 

                Hello, my name is Rainy Willis. I would like to start by thanking ILC for the wonderful courses and learning that they have given me this past year. In this post, I am going to be covering a specific environmental issue that I have chosen to study for this course. I will start by explaining the issue at hand and continue by explaining how we can fix it and why it is here in the first place. So without further adieu, I present the threat of plastic.

               The world we live in is so vast and has so many problems that it was quite hard to pinpoint which issue I should focus on. However, after thinking and researching for some time I decided that plastic was what I would focus on. Yes, it is a small problem some may think, well that is just the thing plastic is one of the biggest problems our current world is facing. Plastic does affect lots of areas in the world, in fact, there aren't many places you can't find plastic anymore but I decided to combine my love of animals and the problem of plastic together. The ocean is a place that has always fascinated me so when I started digging deeper into the threat that plastic is becoming to ocean life I was shocked. It had never occurred to me how much humans are disturbing the ocean even with something as small as plastic. The problem with plastic is that it never decomposes...ever. Dr. Kim Warner says "Plastic doesn't play nice with living things. While evolution can turn everything from wood to flesh back into carbon dioxide and water, but almost nothing can biodegrade plastic."https://oceana.org/about-oceana/people-partners/oceana-staff/kim-warner So you may be asking yourselves if something never decomposed where does it all go. Well, it goes everywhere just look around you, but mainly it goes into landfills (which usually leak into the ocean), and directly into the ocean itself. Now you might be saying what about recycling, well the sad truth is that only about 9% of the entire plastic footprint has ever been recycled. The things that don't get recycled end up in landfills, oceans, animals, rain, and our food.

            Let me explain; To start with all of the excess unrecycled garbage gets put into landfills, but landfills can only be filled so high so when the landfills fill up oh well it can just go into the ocean. 22 million kilograms of garbage every day gets dumped into the ocean that amounts to about one full garbage truck every minute! Then once it is all in the ocean the animals eat it or get ensnared in it and die. Several different cases show proof and pictures of whales and orcas washed up on shores all over the world full of plastic. 

Not only is plastic showing up in whales but it is also being ingested by smaller fish which we then consume. So we are recycling our own garbage by basically eating it. Fun Fact: A normal human being consumes about enough plastic to make a credit card per week. Now I saved the best one for last. Rain...how might plastic end up in rain you might say that's impossible, well Gregory Wetherbee says otherwise. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/12/raining-plastic-colorado-usgs-microplastics In this article Wetherbee explains how he happened across this strange phenomenon. Not only was there plastic rain found in the rocky mountains but apparently all over the place. France, and China, Dongguan, and the Pyrenees mountains all have had a case reported of "plastic" rain.

        If this hasn't disturbed you enough so far it's about to get worse. Along with plastic in the rain, food, and animals worldwide scientists are also discovering that certain types of plastics when consumed can cause infertility! https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/27/plastics-leading-to-reproductive-problems-for-wildlife In this article it describes a pod of orcas just off of the coast of Scotland who has been known for their high levels of PCB (which is a toxic plastic) haven't calved in over 25 years! It goes on to talk about Lulu the orca. It says: "One washed-up Orca, given the name Lulu by researchers, was found to have 957 mg/kg of PBC's accumulated in lipid tissue, a level 100 times above the threshold of toxicity. Though of reproductive age, Lulu was found to have failed to calf. "Lulu was barren as if she was a juvenile," said Paul Jepson from the Zoological Society of London and a co-author of the paper. "But she should have been in her prime."

            This is just scratching the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other problems aside from this one and there are a lot of things that need to be done about it. I hope that providing people with this information will enlighten them and help them to realize what is going on around us.