Plastic is a bigger danger than global warming, or at least it is in the immediate sense, considering it is snuffing out the lowest common denominator in the food chain, says Neil Seldman, a waste recycling expert and president of the Institute for Local Self Reliance, an organization with a long track record of promoting sustainable communities.
Will 2014 be the year we finally get serious about, “Saying NO to Plastics”?
Forget the hokum about global warming. Plastic pollution can be seen everywhere. This problem is here now not some place in the distant future.
The vast amount of plastic trash that enters the oceans is a real problem, a problem that grows ever omnipresent on a hourly basis.
Plastic pollution is destroying the world’s ocean ecosystems. The real problem with all the plastic entering the oceans is the fact that it never degrades. It photodegrades into smaller and smaller pieces of plastic particles.
Billions upon billions of smaller and smaller plastic pieces have now become part of the food chain finally absorbed within zooplankton.
The oceans are constantly in motion. Areas called gyres pull in waste from one part of the world and bring to other side of the world. As the plastic photodegrades into barely visible pieces, plankton have plastic debris in their bodies. Zoo-plankton are at the core of the marine food chain.
This situation is so dire that we have places in the oceans where plastic debris outnumbers plankton.
Unfortunately, that is not the worst of it. When birds, fish, and other sea creatures and mammals ingest plastic debris which they mistake plastic bottle caps and bits and pieces for food’ the consequences often lead to a long slow death.
When these creatures consume plastic debris they suffer with blockages of digestive tract followed by satiation, starvation and general debilitating and finally death.
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