Posted by Michael
You go to the beach on a hot day with your bottle of water and bag of chips. You are lazy so you decide not to throw away your trash and you leave it on the sandy shore. Little do you know that sea birds can mistake it as food, or the tide can wash it in and a fish could think its an easy meal. This tiny decision that you made is adding two pieces of plastic waste to the 5 trillion pieces already in the ocean. Each water bottle when you first come to the beach what do you think of? The hot sand, cool ocean, sand castles. You think of all the good stuff. But there are so many bad things that go on behind this. 260 million tonnes of plastic waste is produced each year. 8 million tonnes of that goes in the ocean. There is a plastic land that is the size of Texas in the ocean. Our team is trying to stop this massacre.
We have decided to do something about plastic waste, specifically the plastic waste that goes into the ocean. We found that over 8 million metric tons of plastic enter the ocean each year. That is the equivalent of 5 bags of plastic for every foot of coastline in the world. And that number is expected to double by 2025. We also found that plastic is not biodegradable, and the only way that it breaks down is by breaking into smaller parts, which is worse because it can go more places. We also found that plastic can get stuck in sea ice and combine with rocks, creating a new material scientists call Plastiglomerate. Another big issue is plastic bottles. They are convenient to use, but they severely damage the environment, and a staggering 1 million bottles are bought around the world every minute. In addition, only 50% of those bottles are recycled, and of that 50% only 7% are turned into new bottles. The rest ends up in the ocean or landfills.
You go to the beach on a hot day with your bottle of water and bag of chips. You are lazy so you decide not to throw away your trash and you leave it on the sandy shore. Little do you know that sea birds can mistake it as food, or the tide can wash it in and a fish could think its an easy meal. This tiny decision that you made is adding two pieces of plastic waste to the 5 trillion pieces already in the ocean. Each water bottle when you first come to the beach what do you think of? The hot sand, cool ocean, sand castles. You think of all the good stuff. But there are so many bad things that go on behind this. 260 million tonnes of plastic waste is produced each year. 8 million tonnes of that goes in the ocean. There is a plastic land that is the size of Texas in the ocean. Our team is trying to stop this massacre.
We have decided to do something about plastic waste, specifically the plastic waste that goes into the ocean. We found that over 8 million metric tons of plastic enter the ocean each year. That is the equivalent of 5 bags of plastic for every foot of coastline in the world. And that number is expected to double by 2025. We also found that plastic is not biodegradable, and the only way that it breaks down is by breaking into smaller parts, which is worse because it can go more places. We also found that plastic can get stuck in sea ice and combine with rocks, creating a new material scientists call Plastiglomerate. Another big issue is plastic bottles. They are convenient to use, but they severely damage the environment, and a staggering 1 million bottles are bought around the world every minute. In addition, only 50% of those bottles are recycled, and of that 50% only 7% are turned into new bottles. The rest ends up in the ocean or landfills.