Apr 02, 2019

A younger perspective on the plastics problem

Young blogger

I am twelve years old and myself and my family are trying to reduce plastic.

My family and I like to be aware of environmental issues and try to limit them by challenging ourselves in what we eat and use.

We were vegan for a month and we gave up palm oil as it was destroying and killing orangutans as well as their habitat. According to many resources like ecology centre and the WWF, plastic is bad for the environment.

Plastic pollutes our oceans...

From my own knowledge, I know that plastic in the ocean can be mistaken for food so lots of the ocean wildlife eat plastic. For example, when people eat fish, it is highly likely that the fish that they are eating has eaten plastic so then they end up eating plastic.

...and the wildlife

As plastic takes somewhere between 450 years and 1,000 years to break up, if any kind of wildlife eats plastic, it will be stuck with that plastic possibly leading to its death, for the rest of its life not including the Antarctic Sponge or jellyfish.

Plastic pollution is affecting the oceans. Picture by by Dustan Woodhouse on Unsplash

Many companies use plastic as it is cheaper than many other materials. Due to how light plastic is, it often flies out and off the backs of trucks whilst on its way to landfill sites and when that happens in coastal areas, it often ends up in our oceans which is how marine life end up mistaking it for food.

Plastic also litters and pollutes our beautiful countryside and cities.

Longer lasting problems

As well as health problems for animals, plastic can also cause health problems for humans such as cancer, birth defects, genetic changes, indigestion, skin diseases, irritation, dizziness and breathing problems.

I do not know anyone who would want any of those problems and I do not think any future generations would want any of those problems even if there was a cure.

The majority of those problems are caused because multiple types of plastics are toxic. Did you know that more than five trillion pieces of plastic litter our ocean?

The affect of plastic pollution will affect the planet for generations to come. Picture by Louis Hansel on Unsplash

And it goes beyond our planet

And what about space, how much plastic is there? When orbiting our planet, any size of space junk could have devastating effects if it was to crash into a rocket but as the smallest size of space junk monitored is ten centimetres, any bottle caps for example could still ruin a space mission like exploring Mars.

Stop and think

Although that is all I know about plastic, that is not all there is to know. If the information in this article has made you think of plastic differently, why not join myself, my family and all the other protesters in reducing plastic.