Plastics🤨

I have written about plastic before like my Plastic Straws blog, or my No More Glitter blog. I have also added things in some blogs about microplastics and stuff. However, I just watched a video in my science class about plastics and I learnt a lot of things that I didn't know about before, so I thought I'd share it!

Plastic - although one of the strongest, best materials - can be very bad for our environment (as you probably know), unless it is recycled. However, only 9% of plastic is recycled and 79% ends up in landfill. The rest, about 8 million pieces of plastics, enter our oceans everyday.  Recycling 9% is a very, very small amount. 

Since plastic is now filling our oceans (by 2050, scientists believe there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish), it is also now in our food chains. Wildlife who live in the sea (and above it, like seabirds) often mistake plastic for food - which is a known fact. Sea birds sometimes pick up the plastic to feed to their chicks, not knowing they are actually slowly killing their young.

Microplastics

Microplastics are tiny pieces of plastic, less than 5mm long, that are very harmful, no matter how tiny. They are in lots of our products, like toothpaste and other personal care products. And they are in the food chains, starting off with mussels or even plankton eating the microplastics, and gradually finding its way up to the top - which is usually us humans. Did you know, in 2017 research showed that 83% of tap water contains pollutants from plastic? So technically we are drinking and consuming a lot more plastic than we thought. But what I am definitely not saying is to drink bottled water instead of tap water, since then you are probably contributing to the plastic that ends up in the oceans and kills our animals. 

Thank you so much for reading this blog! I would definitely recommend watching Drowning in Plastic (although it is an hour and a half long) because I learnt a lot of interesting things, for example: just litter picking and recycling plastic will not make much of a difference, we really need to stop producing more. Next week, I'll do a part two of this since there is so much more I wanted to say, but it got way too long! 

Violet

         xxx