Buying a bottle of water doesn’t seem like a bad idea, right? After all, printed on the bottle is a small recycling symbol – that must be a good sign. However, what the symbol doesn’t tell you is that try as we might to reduce, reuse and recycle plastic containers, every piece of plastic ever produced is still hanging around in the environment. In the U.S. alone, the average person consumes 167 water bottles per year and uses 350 to 500 plastic bags per year.
According to one environmental research group, 38 billion plastic water bottles overflow landfills annually. In these landfills, it can take up to 1000 years for one bottle to decompose. The idea of plastic decomposing is dangerous for sea otters and other sea creatures. 80% of plastic found at sea originates from land.
Once in the ocean, plastic causes multiple problems:
1) Debris ingestion
2) Wildlife entanglement and habitat destruction
3) Sea otters often mistake water bottle caps for food and/or toys
4) The plastic fills up animals’ stomachs but obviously provides no nutrition. Nothing is digested and they starve from the inside out
5) Fishing gear can entangle wildlife and cause serious injury or death
The sea otter is a cute and intelligent marine mammal. However, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the sea otter is a threatened species. All this pollution causes serious injury and illness and eventually results in death. Respecting the ocean and its diverse wildlife must be a priority if we want to protect the environment.
Although plastic does degrade in the ocean, the process alone releases a myriad of chemicals that interfere with hormone functions, causes obesity and/or cancer and diminishes fertility in animals and people.
The important question to ask is: What can you do to help? Here are a few tips to get you started:
Reuse items whenever possible / choose reusable items over disposable ones
Reduce the amount of waste you produce
Recycle as much as possible and buy recycled products when possible
Say ‘no’ to single-use plastics and encourage others to do the same
Cut down on your use of plastic straws
If you don’t need a bag, don’t use one… Reduce your individual waste stream!