The Antlerette August 12 2019 Volume 94 Issue 1
The Plastic Pollution Around the World Kyle Williams, Staff As our modern civilization ages, the amount of plastic waste we produce and allow to freely pollute Earth’s oceans grows and grows every year. Over 8 million metric tons of plastic enters the ocean each year. That’s enough trash to cover every coastline around the world 5 times! Sadly the majority of people on earth choose to ignore this truth. Whether it is walking down the street, driving down a crowded roadway, or riding on any type of public transportation, we see plastic everywhere we go. The average person won’t take the time to pick up someone else’s mess or even think about what they do to their own, and then, said plastic usually ends up in the oceans, lakes, rivers, or any body of water. Plastic floods our water resources and it takes over how we eat or drink the items we love, yet no one with a voice in our world will come up and put an end to this crisis. I interviewed Selena Enriquez, a thoughtful and opinionated activist and environmentalist who strides for everybody in our community to take the time, effort, and responsibility to help make our planet clean for everybody’s health and well-being. One moto she had brought up was to use the 4 R’s: Reduce, Recycle, Reuse, and Rot.
Those four words would make the biggest impact if everyone thought about their actions. All the plastic that has not been put away correctly or recycled properly makes its way towards our oceans worldwide. Whether it is a plastic straw, plastic lid, a plastic cup, a plastic utensil, a plastic bagyou get the point. We all need to acknowledge how much plastic we use, along with the damage it does to our environment and our health. So what are ways we, as a community, can help stop pollution and detoxify the earth? First, we need to reduce our production and use of single waste-in order to first manage the waste that already polluted our earth. Then we all should join an anti-polluting group to travel around the globe and pick up plastic that has been dragged up shore, take boats and go out into the ocean, and create what are usually plastic items and make them reusable and non plastic to make our world a better place.
https://blueocean.net/the-good-the-bad-andthe-ugly-of-plastic-pollution/