I stumbled across this talk by Sarah Dudas, who discussed the amount of microplastics we faced in our lives without even realising, as well as some starting points on how we can reduce our microplastic pollution. I highly reccommend you watch it before reading this post.
As the author of a blog dedicated wholly towards microplastic pollution on land, and in the oceans, I have to confess that I started this blog with very limited knowledge of what the whole microplastic pollution deal really entailed. I knew the basics – we humans produce through different products we use in our everyday lives, and that the impacts of microplastic pollution were severe. What I never realised was that we produced so much microplastics, it was terrifying. To imagine that our oceans were becoming more filled with plastics than it did fish and other marine life. I never thought much about my facial cleansers that contained enough microplastics to last well into the next century, or the things I used in my everyday life – I had always naively assumed that if I wasn’t the one throwing a plastic bottle into the ocean, then I wasn’t part of the problem.
We humans have become so reliant on plastics that if you or I were to just look around us as we read this and count the plastics that we used, the number would likely hit a hundred or even two. Although some plastic goods are made to last, like the Nalgene bottle I’ve carried around with me everyday for the past 3 years, it is too presumptuous to assume that it doesn’t also contribute to the pollution issue plaguing our earth. Whether we see it or not, we are always adding on to the mountains of plastic waste in our landfills and the plastic soup of our oceans.
Hence, I would like to invite you to also think deeply about the macro and microplastics in your everyday life and whether or not they have made your life more convenient at the expense of the environment. However, it is also important that we do not immediately purge all our plastic products the moment we begin to see the problem of plastic pollution surrounding us. It would do no good if we were to instantly throw out everything plastic, only for it to be sent to a landfill and buried; it doesn’t solve much, only addes on even more. Where possible, it is a good idea to use up your plastic products until the end of its life cycle before retiring it and replacing the product with something more sustainable. For instance, instead of throwing out all plastic cutlery at home, use it until it breaks or becomes too worn out for use. We may feel anxious to solve the plastic pollution problem the moment we see it, but it takes time for us to fully make the switch to a plastic-lite lifestyle.
