A plastic tide

Plastic has been extremely useful for humans from when it was first discovered in 1940. Imagine a cheap thing that you use for everything and can be thrown away immediately! That must have been amazing for the people who first tried it, too good to be true even. Well yes, it is too good to be true, the plastic is made with oil that cannot biodegrade, so we still have all the plastic of these 80 years!

Imagine that we throw a whole truck of plastic into the ocean a minute! And there are several types of plastic too! There is the individual use plastic which are the horrible plastic bags that you can only use once! Then there are the microplastics, tiny pieces of plastic that the fish eat easily.

The fish, turtles and birds die because of us! The turtle sees a plastic bag that looks exactly like their favorite food (jellyfish) and eats it. They immediately choke and die. Then the fish see microplastic which also looks like food and eat it. The bigger fish then eat the small fish and now have an insane amount of plastic in them. The birds eat the plastic and feel full all the time and so don’t eat and starve to death.

Plastic not only hurts the environment but also us! When we eat the fish, we are really eating the small fish, that are full of plastic. We don’t know what plastic does to us yet because the amount of plastic we have in us is still low but who knows what will happen when we have too much plastic in us.

It is estimated that if we do not change by 2050 all the plastic in the ocean will weigh more than the fish! 2050 is not in a long time, it is only 29 years away! If we do not change our habits the planet and the entire population will be in a lot of trouble.

All of this is terrible, but we can still do something about it. There is no such thing as something “too small to make a difference” anything helps! You can reuse plastic that you buy, use metal water bottles to refill each time, and just not buy any plastic! And really there are many more incredible, different ways to save our world. REMEMBER plastic is NOT a joke!