Plastic waste has been on my mind for quite some time now. Actually, I remember a time that whenever I used to go to a shop, I used to make it a point to explain to the shopkeeper how bad it was to be having lots of plastic on our society. Shopkeepers give us plastic for almost everything we buy. Yu get your stuff wrapped in plastic bags no matter if you are buying a small pack of cigarettes. People get the stuff in plastic and then simply throw the bags in their trash cans. This plastic, then, either comes out in the fields or ends up in an ocean. The really bad thing about plastic is that it does not decay in the soil or the environment. You have to burn it to completely get rid of it. And when you burn it, it releases a toxic sulfur dioxide.
In our country, we lament mal-practices of many institutions and people. Much of this lamentation happens in public places like shops or cafes. We don’t care much about ourselves while throwing and disposing of so much plastic in our soil. Plastic literally ruins our soil. When I try to explain these things to the shopkeeper, it naturally takes some stamina. I have also felt that I came across as a nutty professor. So the intensity of emphasizing this point kind of reduced over time. But now I see that Avaaz has taken an initiative about this. They have created a petition and are asking everyone across the globe to sign it. Perhaps you should also sign it even if you don’t mean it. Sometimes you take action first and latter start meaning it.
Our oceans can’t breathe
By 2050 the ocean will have more plastic than fish! But in days, governments are meeting to address this emergency. If one million of us join the campaign to stop the flood of plastics, it’ll be announced to all the delegates from the podium. Click to sign!
Moreover, read the following articles and try to appreciate the problem of plastic.
The Oceans Are Drowning In Plastic — And No One’s Paying Attention
Imagine an area 34 times the size of Manhattan. Now imagine it covered ankle-deep in plastic waste – piles of soda bottles and plastic bags, takeout containers by the mile, drinking straws as far as the eye can see.
The Arctic Ocean Is Clogging With Billions of Plastic Bits
Pollution is now as dense in the northernmost ocean as it is in the Atlantic and Pacific. In other words, the Arctic Ocean has become the Northern Hemisphere’s “dead end” for floating plastic. “Our data demonstrate that the marine plastic pollution has reached a global scale after only a few decades using plastic materials,” said Andrés Cózar Cabañas, a biologist at the University of Cádiz.
Even your sea salt is almost certainly contaminated with plastic
What goes around, comes around, eventually. The latest karmic zinger is how likely you now are to find plastic particles, from packaging you might have once used, in your sea salt. Each year, humans dump 13 million metric tons of plastic into the ocean.
Full scale of plastic in the world’s oceans revealed for first time
More than five trillion pieces of plastic, collectively weighing nearly 269,000 tonnes, are floating in the world’s oceans, causing damage throughout the food chain, new research has found. Data collected by scientists from the US, France, Chile, Australia and New Zealand suggests a minimum of 5.25tn plastic particles in the oceans, most of them “micro plastics” measuring less than 5mm.
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My Lamentation of Plastic Waste by Psyops Prime is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.