Gabe Winter
Mr. Short
AP Lang
05 October 2019
Our Trash.
During summer vacation, my family and I were walking along the beach I hear a little girl shout, Mommy look what I found, its a crab! Everybody’s first thoughts were how cute of this little girl, but when we saw the grab itself everyone looked in horror and in disgust of humanity. The crab was wrapped around a six-pack beverage rings, the poor thing was stuck there with no way out.
Every day approximately 8 million pieces of plastic pollution find their way into our oceans. If you were to tell someone this a century ago they would laugh, the sad part is this is the reality we live in, this is the world we live in.
Plastics are used because they are easy and cheap materials to make, they also help products to last a long time. Unfortunately these very useful qualities make plastic a huge pollution problem. Because the plastic is cheap it gets discarded easily and its great amount in the environment can do great harm.
Urbanization has added to the plastic pollution in concentrated form in cities. Plastic thrown on land can enter the drainage lines and choke them resulting into floods in local areas in cities as was experienced in Mumbai, India in 1998. It was claimed in one of the programmes on TV that eating plastic bags results in death of 100 cattle per day in U.P. in India. More than 90% of the articles found on the sea beaches contained plastic. The plastic trash found on beaches near urban areas tends to originate from use on land, such as packaging material used to wrap around other goods. On remote rural beaches the trash tends to have come from ships, such as fishing equipment used in the fishing industry. This plastic can affect marine wildlife in two terrible ways these creatures could become entangled with the waste, or they can end up eating it thinking its food and die. Of these sea creatures turtles are particularly affected by plastic pollution, and all seven of the worlds turtle species are already either endangered or threatened for a number of reasons. Turtles get entangled in fishing nets, and many sea turtles have been found dead with plastic bags in their stomachs. Turtles mistake floating transparent plastic bags for jellyfish and eat them.In one dead turtles found off Hawaii in the Pacific more than 1,000 pieces of plastic were found in its stomach.
A recent US report concluded that more than 100,000 marine mammals die every year in the worlds oceans by eating or becoming entangled in plastic trash, and the position is worsening world-wide, 75 marine bird species are known to eat plastic articles. This includes 36 species found off South Africa. A recent study of blue petrel chicks on South Africas remote Marine Island showed that 90% of chicks examined had plastic in their stomachs apparently fed to them accidentally by their parents. South African seabirds are among the worst affected in the world. Plastics may remain in the stomach, blocking digestion and possibly causing starvation.
With all these negatives about plastic invading our oceans you may be asking What could we do to stop this? well there are many things we could do starting with you. There are several ways to overcome these problems like reducing the use of plastic bags and law enforcements. One of the environmental impacts is a large amount of waste products are created during the production of plastics in the factory. The waste products have been divided into different waste streams that is gaseous, liquid, solid due to different types of raw materials are used. For example, gaseous waste products are discharged such as carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide are the factors of causing global warming and air pollution.
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