River's Plastic Editorial
SINGLE-USE
PLASTICS BAN - By River
Mostly
everything around, us is plastic that was created by humans since 1900 and is
still on this planet and rapidly deteriorating Earth. This man-made material
has been destroying aquatic/terrestrial ecosystems and poisoning the whole food
chain for centuries, and nothing is being done about it.
I'll put it
in perspective for you, us humans have been mass producing single-use plastics
for about 100 years and still in counting. We produce 300 million tons of
plastic every year, which is turned into different single-use plastics like
bags, bottles, utensils and more. For example, five trillion plastic bags are
made a year and only 5 percent are recycled. All single-use plastics like straws,
coffee stirrers, wrappings, etc., are used once and thrown away into garbage
then thought to end up in landfills. The plastics made a century ago would’ve
now decomposed, but we still are creating 5 times more than the amount of
plastics 50 years ago
Plastics
being transported to landfills usually are blown into drains and waterways, even
plastics from your washing machine can enter oceans that way, so try recycling
all your plastics. Also littering is a big factor, a lot of the times people
just throw their garbage on the ground, which accumulates over time since
plastic doesn’t decompose and isn’t biodegradable. It can take up to 1000 years
to decompose plastics depending on the material, but if everyone switched to
biodegradable plastics takes around a year to decompose in landfills. Plastic
is made from oil and chemicals but if we switched to a biodegradable plastic we
would save more than 63 billion gallons of oil, as well as decrease pollution a
lot.
Plastic isn’t
essential to our everyday lives, it’s just an easy access and we really don’t
need it since it’s doing us worse. We must take actions in our own hands, even
though a small group like our school can’t totally ban plastics but we can
reduce our uses, recycle, or even clean up after ourselves. You can use
alternatives like reusable bags, water bottles, use your own containers, and
avoid straws. Also, since it takes different chemicals to create plastic it
also emits those chemicals back into our blood and slowly poisoning us. If we
stop buying plastics from companies, they’ll eventually go out of business and
stop supplying this everlasting material and us and our Earth will go back to
plastic-free living.
https://ensia.com/features/methane-landfills/
https://ensia.com/features/methane-landfills/
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