By Eleni Karipidis
Plastic is generally used for everyday life from plastic bags, to plastic kitchen utensils. We tend to take advantage of plastic and overuse it, harming not only our environment, but our health as well. Plastic is looked at as a cheap material used to produce many everyday items, while it is destroying the lives of many living things. Plastic is a dangerous substance that needs to be controlled before it causes environmental and health crises.
All around us changes are happening. Although all of these changes go on, we see minor differences in our environment's health. On the news you can hear all about Global Warming, oil spills, pollution killing animals, and so on. A lot play a role in slowly tearing our environment apart, and mainly one of those things are one of the most common littered materials, plastic. Around 60 to 90 percent of the worlds wastes happen to be plastic products. Plastic is so common that there is basically no chance in fully removing it from our lives. Everywhere, around us, we can find plastic items from children's toys, silverware, cups, bottles, bags to phones and TVS. LifeWithoutPlastic agrees that plastic is basically one of the most common materials today that ends up polluting our world, "Synthetic plastic does not biodegrade. It just sits and accumulates in landfills or pollutes the environment." Most plastics are made from petroleum or natural gas, and non-renewable resources extracted and processed using techniques that destroy many fragile ecosystems. The process of manufacturing plastic, as well as its destruction by incineration, pollutes air, land and water. It is believed that there are 5.25 trillion plastic debris in the ocean affecting the ecosystems of many marine animals. Also, 100,000 marine creatures die each year from getting tangled in plastic, not to mention approximately 1 million sea birds also die from plastic. As explained by Ocean Crusaders Education, "A plastic bag can kill numerous animals because they take so long to disintegrate. An animal that dies from the bag will decompose and the bag will be released, another animal could harmlessly fall victim and once again eat the same bag." Around the world, 13,000-15,000 pieces of plastic are being dumped into the ocean everyday. We are invading the homes of other living organisms throughout our lives by not focusing on our usage of plastic items. Even on land we make some poor choices with littering our surroundings. Some parks today seem to be wastelands that children still play in. This is not even the beginning of plastic issues in our environments, there are also many that have to do with harming our health.
In plastic factories you find plastic, toxins, and lots of workers. These workers are working with extremely toxic chemicals, including carcinogens. Toxic chemicals inside plastic includes Bisphenol A, one of the most prevalent chemicals in our lives that can release harmful carcinogens, Phthalates and Dioxin, endocrine-disrupting chemicals that are known to be linked to later-life breast cancer, Vinyl Chloride, one of the first chemicals designated as a human carcinogen, and Styrene, found in Styrofoam as a possible carcinogen. Imagine how many of these chemicals are inhaled on a daily basis of these workers, not to mention what we inhale already. Americans also consume 8.6 billion gallons of bottled water annually. Globally we consume 53 billion gallons of water bottles per year and only 1 in 5 of those bottles get recycled. When a water bottle is old or heated to a certain extent the chemicals leak into the water making it even worse to drink. Chewing or eating plastic is just as bad. The chemicals inside plastic can affect your internal organs abnormally, leaving you with a nettlesome situation. The toxins in plastic are risky, even if you try your best to be aware of your usage, there is a slight chance of you exposing yourself to the cancerous complications plastic chemicals can give you.
Plastic waste is slowly ruining our environment and health. Not only is it killing animals, but killing people, and other organisms. There are so many harmful uses for plastic in our world today, leaving us with a lot of oceanic wastes, pollution and litter. Although we cannot cure plastic wastes, we can further prevent it with the help of organizations and each other simply starting with a blue bin.
Plastic is generally used for everyday life from plastic bags, to plastic kitchen utensils. We tend to take advantage of plastic and overuse it, harming not only our environment, but our health as well. Plastic is looked at as a cheap material used to produce many everyday items, while it is destroying the lives of many living things. Plastic is a dangerous substance that needs to be controlled before it causes environmental and health crises.
All around us changes are happening. Although all of these changes go on, we see minor differences in our environment's health. On the news you can hear all about Global Warming, oil spills, pollution killing animals, and so on. A lot play a role in slowly tearing our environment apart, and mainly one of those things are one of the most common littered materials, plastic. Around 60 to 90 percent of the worlds wastes happen to be plastic products. Plastic is so common that there is basically no chance in fully removing it from our lives. Everywhere, around us, we can find plastic items from children's toys, silverware, cups, bottles, bags to phones and TVS. LifeWithoutPlastic agrees that plastic is basically one of the most common materials today that ends up polluting our world, "Synthetic plastic does not biodegrade. It just sits and accumulates in landfills or pollutes the environment." Most plastics are made from petroleum or natural gas, and non-renewable resources extracted and processed using techniques that destroy many fragile ecosystems. The process of manufacturing plastic, as well as its destruction by incineration, pollutes air, land and water. It is believed that there are 5.25 trillion plastic debris in the ocean affecting the ecosystems of many marine animals. Also, 100,000 marine creatures die each year from getting tangled in plastic, not to mention approximately 1 million sea birds also die from plastic. As explained by Ocean Crusaders Education, "A plastic bag can kill numerous animals because they take so long to disintegrate. An animal that dies from the bag will decompose and the bag will be released, another animal could harmlessly fall victim and once again eat the same bag." Around the world, 13,000-15,000 pieces of plastic are being dumped into the ocean everyday. We are invading the homes of other living organisms throughout our lives by not focusing on our usage of plastic items. Even on land we make some poor choices with littering our surroundings. Some parks today seem to be wastelands that children still play in. This is not even the beginning of plastic issues in our environments, there are also many that have to do with harming our health.
In plastic factories you find plastic, toxins, and lots of workers. These workers are working with extremely toxic chemicals, including carcinogens. Toxic chemicals inside plastic includes Bisphenol A, one of the most prevalent chemicals in our lives that can release harmful carcinogens, Phthalates and Dioxin, endocrine-disrupting chemicals that are known to be linked to later-life breast cancer, Vinyl Chloride, one of the first chemicals designated as a human carcinogen, and Styrene, found in Styrofoam as a possible carcinogen. Imagine how many of these chemicals are inhaled on a daily basis of these workers, not to mention what we inhale already. Americans also consume 8.6 billion gallons of bottled water annually. Globally we consume 53 billion gallons of water bottles per year and only 1 in 5 of those bottles get recycled. When a water bottle is old or heated to a certain extent the chemicals leak into the water making it even worse to drink. Chewing or eating plastic is just as bad. The chemicals inside plastic can affect your internal organs abnormally, leaving you with a nettlesome situation. The toxins in plastic are risky, even if you try your best to be aware of your usage, there is a slight chance of you exposing yourself to the cancerous complications plastic chemicals can give you.
Plastic waste is slowly ruining our environment and health. Not only is it killing animals, but killing people, and other organisms. There are so many harmful uses for plastic in our world today, leaving us with a lot of oceanic wastes, pollution and litter. Although we cannot cure plastic wastes, we can further prevent it with the help of organizations and each other simply starting with a blue bin.