Plastic in Our Environment

Each year we are drinking 30 billion throw-away bottles of water worldwide.  That is 2.7 MILLION TONS of plastic!  If you put the bottles end to end, they would go around the world more than 150 times, and that is every single year. 

Even with all of the recycling programs, so many of these bottles are still being thrown away, leading to a huge plastics pollution problem. Bottles buried in landfill can take up to 1000 years to biodegrade and millions of tons of plastics are making their way into our oceans.  It is calculated that there are currently 3 million tons of plastic waste floating in our oceans! 

It is calculated that by the year 2020 approximately 7.25 million tons of plastic will be floating in our oceans.  According to scientists, this would take 79,000 years to be cleaned up!  We need to act now. Please do your part to reduce plastic waste.


How to Properly Recycle Plastic

Plastic is everywhere. Water bottles, grocery bags, and student ID cards are just some of the things made from plastic. Most plastics are made from byproducts of petrochemicals. Plastics are a significant source of litter and cause a lot of pollution. By creating a never-ending wave of plastic, we waste needed resources and pollute the environment. It's important to recycle and reuse as much plastic as possible.
https://www.wristband.com/content/how-to-properly-recycle-plastic/


How Polluted Oceans Hurt Us and How We Can Protect Them

https://connectforwater.org


The Oceans Are Drowning In Plastic -- And No One's Paying Attention

"We're being overwhelmed by our waste."
https://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/plastic-waste-oceans_us_58fed37be4b0c46f0781d426


National Geographic

As of Jan 2015 reported by the National Geographic 5.25 Trillion pieces of plastic debris in the ocean. Of that mass, 269,000 tons float on the surface, while some four billion plastic microfibers per square kilometre litter the deep sea.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/01/150109-oceans-plastic-sea-trash-science-marine-debris/



Plastic Pollution: ~ Our Today is Forever

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8s7uIzmesI&feature=player_embedded
https://www.plasticpollutioncoalition.org

Captain Charles Moore: Sailing the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Charles+Moore%3A+Sailing+the+Great+Pacific+Garbage+Patch


ADDITIONAL RESOURCE

ERIZON

All across the world, there is poverty, war, terrorism, and threats of human violence. But in the face of all these, we may not realize we are also amid dangers that can place the entire humankind on its knees in one full sweep.
These articles aim to make people aware of what is going on in the deeper trenches of our planet.

We discuss environmental issues in four extensive sections.


Worldwide, “single-use packaging is the
biggest source of trash”
 


In 2015, volunteers in the group’s International Coastal Clean-up event collected almost 1 million plastic beverage bottles, 800,000 plastic bottle caps, and about half a million each of plastic bags and drinking straws — and this was in just a single day!