Photo by Midway Journey via flickr
The 40th birthday of Earth Day is tomorrow and our earth, herself, is in far worse shape than she was when this idealistic day was named in her honor. One of the biggest contributors to her rapid decline is garbage. Or more specifically, plastic.
Man-made garbage is everywhere. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average person produces about 1,600 pounds of trash each week, and plastic makes up the majority of that waste.
A material made from petroleum, plastic is a combination of crude oil and natural gas, taken from below the earth’s surface. Don’t let the word “natural” fool you, though. Yes, it is natural in it’s earthly home, deep beneath the earth’s crust, but it is not natural when drilled from the ground and combined in a syntheses of synthetic union with other elements. What we are left with is a product that the earth can not digest, unless incinerated – and the incineration of plastic releases toxic chemicals into the atmosphere that can cause life-threatening diseases, such as cancer.
When presented with such unequivocal facts it makes you wonder why we continue to produce plastic at all. The answer is money. Plastic is used for virtually everything in the consumer market, from packaging to bottled water.
But, because of its multitudinous uses, our planet is overflowing with an immeasurable amount of waste. Especially in our oceans where 90% of all the trash floating in the sea is plastic.
More than 200 billion pounds of plastic is produced each year and 10 percent of it ends up in the ocean, according to Greenpeace. 70 percent of this content sinks, killing life at the bottom of the ocean. Sea turtles are often trapped in plastic nets and other marine life frequently ingest plastic bags, mistaking them for jellyfish. The remainder of the waste floats, washing into near by garbage patches on the ocean’s surface, leaving the rest to wash to shore.
Currently, the largest garbage patch is located between Hawaii and San Francisco and is most popularly known as The Great Garbage Patch. Containing approximately 3.5 million tons of trash, it is a tangled, swirling tide pool of trapped waste, that from a distance can easily be mistaken for an island the size of Texas.
The hard truth is that the production of plastic is depleting any resemblance of a healthy quality of life and literally draining the vitality from our oceans. Until we find a way to reduce our use of plastic and create better solutions for packaging, that “island” the size of Texas could grow into its own continent-sized entity.
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