Our Earth is sacred. It has been home to life for 3.5 billion years, and to human life for 200,000. It has sown its soil with crops for us to gather, and grazed the land with animals for us to consume. It has circulated cascading rivers for us to drink from, and oceans for us to swim in. It has grown trees to give us shelter, and bubbled with oil to power our vehicles. The habitable environment that the Earth has granted us has fostered life as we know it. Without its undying generosity, life on Earth would have been doomed from the beginning.
Yet, despite its every sacrifice, humans have abused the Earth to the highest degree. We have squeezed it dry of gifts to offer, and clawed away at its raw materials for our own benefit. We have blackened its beautiful skies in the name of progress, and have destroyed entire ecosystems for our own selfish desires. To man, the Earth is simply a dead thing he can claim. Repeated offenses against the environment have extended across the world throughout human history, but there is no better example of our environmental destruction than in our overwhelming consumption of plastic and production of garbage.
Plastic: A Modern Epidemic
The world depends on plastic. Each year, we generate over 300 million tons of plastic, of which only 9 percent is recycled. Due to an unsettling rise in ‘single-use’ products, an estimated 8 million metric tons of plastic are thrown into the ocean every year. That’s enough to line every coastline in the world with grocery bags stuffed with plastic trash.
The worst thing about plastic is its undying persistence to stay around. If the Pilgrims sailed to Plymouth with plastic aboard their ships, it would still be around today, nearly 400 years later. Since its creation in the 1950s, the world has produced 9.2 billion tons of plastic, with 2/3 of that amount having never made it to a recycling bin.
The Consequences of Plastic
This excess of plastic waste has done nothing to keep our oceans clean. Environmental scientists have scratched their head at the sheer amount of waste that ends up in our ocean since the gradual emergence of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. However, speculation has pointed to Asian techniques of trash removal, specifically that of China. With little incinerators to properly dispose of waste, these countries carelessly dump their garbage on land or into rivers. From there, the waste is either blown or washed into the ocean, dooming marine life to staggeringly high death rates.
Nearly 700 marine species, including countless endangered ones, have been affected by the sudden spike of plastic in the ocean. Though some have been physically harmed by the existence of plastic in the ocean–strangled by six-pack soda rings or fish nets– most of the harm stems from the accidental consumption of micro-plastics. The end result is what the president of United Nations’ Environmental Program called ‘the ocean armageddon’, an epidemic punctuated by a rise in marine animal death that shows next to no sign of stopping.
Why the Indifference?
America is the world’s worst offender of the waste epidemic, with 624,700 metric tons of trash discarded everyday. However, America’s clear participation in this global predicament extends further than the sheer amount of garbage we produce a day. Our worst offense is the general disconnect between ourselves and our trash, as well as a routinely indifferent response to the trash epidemic.
The truth of the matter is that we throw our trash away without seriously considering the consequences of our trash production. Throwing away trash in America has never been easier. When we’re done using a plastic product, we throw it away and never see it again. It is simply more convenient to use single-use products, and is often considered to be more clean. We do not see the landfills that our garbage is shipped to. We do not smell its unforgiving stench, or watch it billow into black clouds of smoke. We are disconnected from the problem, but that does not mean that it isn’t happening.
How We Can Change
The curious thing about ocean plastic is that it is entirely uncomplicated. There are no ‘ocean plastic deniers’ as there are climate change deniers. Ocean plastic is a concrete, definitive issue, with very real and comprehensible solutions. Picking up garbage is not difficult. Properly disposing of garbage and recycling plastic is a habit that everyone can adapt.
Not all is hopeless. Individual cities, such as Baltimore, have implemented machines called ‘trash wheels’, which have collected 680,000 kilograms of trash in 2018 alone. These trash wheels collect trash in bodies of water that flow into the ocean, consequently preventing marine animal harm, and ensuring cleaner waters.
More complex solutions revolve around bans or taxes on single-use items, such as plastic grocery bags or straws. Bans and ‘plastic taxes’ such as these may seem arbitrary, but they make a difference. California enforced such regulation, and saw the percentage of plastic bags along their coast fall from 7% to 2%.
Sometimes it’s as simple as making a conscientious effort to be environmentally friendly. Making the easy switch from single-use products to reusable ones may seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but abstaining from waste adds up, and prevents further pollution.
When the Earth gave us the sea to swim in, we spat plastic upon its shores. We must tend to the wounds we have inflicted if we wish to maintain human life as we know it. For if we do nothing to atone for our past offenses, the giving tree will simply have nothing left to give.
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