The Pains of Plastic

If I were to ask you what the most common type of litter washed up on the beach is, what comes to mind?

If you thought of plastic, then you are right! According to the Ocean Conservancy’s 2018 International Coastal Cleanup (ICC) report, the total amount of plastic far exceeded any other type of waste found.

Why is this concerning?

For starters, the harm to marine life.

Larger pieces of plastic, such as wrappers and bags, may be seen as food to marine creatures blocking their digestive tract once consumed. The creatures also get entangled in plastic debris, oftentimes maiming, and killing them.

Another form of plastic pollution comes in the form of microplastics, small particles that are less than 5mm in length. Primary microplastics are plastics that are manufactured to be small such as in care products and cosmetics while secondary microplastics are produced when larger plastics are broken down.

This report by GESAMP shows that consuming these microplastics affects the feeding and growth of marine creatures, and even though there has been no evidence to show the impact on humans yet, I am sure you would not want to be consuming plastic every time you eat seafood.

Photo by Brian Yurasits (https://www.wildlifebyyuri.com/free-ocean-photography) on unsplash
Photo by Brian Yurasits (https://www.wildlifebyyuri.com/free-ocean-photography) on unsplash

But have you ever wondered where all these plastics come from and how they enter the ocean?

Well for one, plastic gets blown into the ocean from landfills or during transport to landfills. Most plastics being lightweight, winds can easily blow them around.

You might think that a simple way to prevent this is simply by recycling more because recycled plastics would not end up in landfills. Well, unfortunately in the case of plastic, very specific types and colours of plastic are recycled in the end, resulting in a large amount still going to the landfill. Furthermore in Singapore, out of 930 000 tonnes of plastic generated in 2019, only 37 000 tonnes were recycled, a mere 4%!

Thus, a good way to reduce the amount of plastic waste would be to use less plastic in the first place or should you have existing plastics at home, try and reuse them in the best way possible.

Another large source of plastic waste is from rivers that carry trash from inland locations to the ocean. Rivers like the Yangtze in China have been reported to carry up to 1.5 million metric tons of litter into the Yellow Sea.

In my opinion, reducing the amount of plastic litter in the sea is a tough problem to solve because reducing plastic consumption would have to come from a huge shift in the mindsets of both producers and consumers, something is very hard to change.

However, even though there are ideas in place to try and remove the existing plastic such as The Interceptor, more has to be done to address the root cause of the problem whether it be through policies or otherwise, we have to reduce the amount of plastic in the seas before all we see in the sea is plastic.

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