Well worth a watch and 6 minutes of your time. Makes you think about what's going on and what we can do to improve the situation. For example, plastic in the ocean outnumbers the marine life by 36 to 1. Every little helps.
Plastic never goes away.
Plastic
is a durable material made to last forever, yet illogically, 33 percent
of it is used once and then thrown away. Plastic cannot biodegrade; it
breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces.
Plastic spoils our groundwater.
There
are thousands of landfills in the world. Buried beneath each
one of them, plastic leachate full of toxic chemicals is seeping into
groundwater and flowing downstream into lakes and rivers.
Plastic attracts other pollutants.
Manufacturers'
additives in plastics, like flame retardants, BPAs and PVCs, can leach
their own toxins. These oily poisons repel water and stick to
petroleum-based objects like plastic debris.
Plastic threatens wildlife.
Entanglement,
ingestion and habitat disruption all result from plastic ending up in
the spaces where animals live. In our oceans alone, plastic debris
outweighs zooplankton by a ratio of 36-to-1.
Plastic piles up in the environment.
Americans
discard more than 30 million tons of plastic a year. Only 8 percent of
that gets recycled. The rest ends up in landfills, is incinerated, or
becomes the invasive species known as 'litter.'
Plastic poisons our food chain.
Even
plankton, the tiniest creatures in our oceans and waterways, are eating
microplastics and absorbing their toxins. The substance displaces
nutritive algae that creatures up the food chain require.
Plastic affects human health.
Chemicals
leached by plastics are in the blood and tissue of nearly all of us.
Exposure to them is linked to cancers, birth defects, impaired immunity,
endocrine disruption and other ailments.
Plastic costs billions to abate.
Everything
suffers: tourism, recreation, business, the health of humans, animals,
fish and birds—because of plastic pollution. The financial damage
continuously being inflicted is inestimable.
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