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The Number of Plastic in Our Oceans Will Give You Chills

How much plastic goes into our environment every day.

By Benjamin SmithPublished 5 years ago 3 min read
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So if eight million metric tons of plastic ends up in our oceans every year, then that means 560 pounds of plastic goes into our oceans a day. So to put that into a visual, Canada is only 8030 KM long, the amount of coastline in kilometers is 620,000. So there is enough plastic going into our oceans a year to travel across Canada 77 times per year. This is a catastrophic number.

Animal species do not have a choice in living with all of our trash polluting their environment. A lot of animals die from plastic, either from consumption/ malnourishment or from being tangled up in it.

Every little bit counts, yes, I strongly agree with that! But not everyone is doing a little bit. The very few who are doing their part just simply cannot do enough by themselves. We need to take a stand against single-use plastics! Because if we keep buying single-use plastics companies will continue to make them. But if we stop buying them companies will stop producing them.

Small things we can do to lower the amount of plastic polluting our oceans is learn proper recycling practices. A good place to start looking is your local recycling program and bottle depots, buy quality over quantity. One example of this is buying one glass or metal water bottle instead of buying a case of plastic water bottles.

In the ocean, plastic bags can take up to 20 years to decompose. This link will take you to a site that has a live count of how many plastic bags have been made so far this year. It is absolutely insane the number of single-use plastics we create just to be thrown away. A simple solution for this is to bring your reusable grocery bags not only to the grocery store, but to every store, shopping for clothes, school supplies, etc. Plastic bottles last up to 450 years and fishing lines up to 600 years. A lot of the plastic in our oceans has broken down into microplastics, which are smaller than a fingernail. With every piece of plastic ever created to still be on our earth in some form and only having nine percent of 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic recycled, yes only nine percent, this is a major problem! We must take action quickly to bring down our consumption of single-use plastics!

For the average person eating a meal, you’re most likely consuming around 100 bits of microplastics per meal, putting this into a visual we are consuming around one credit card a week. Over the course of a year closer to 70,000 pieces or 52 credit cards.

Taking a closer look at our clothing could be the main contender in the ever-growing number of microfibers in our oceans. More than 700,000 microplastics fibers could be released into the environment during one cycle of a small shirt, depending on the type of material being washed. Studies show that one million fibers could be released from washing the polyester fleece.

Looking at the lint collected in your dryer, but on a much smaller scale, the size of these microplastics is five MM in length, with diameters measured in micrometers. As we all know, none of our washers or dryers have screens of this fine a grade to catch these micro fibers, so every time we wash our clothes there are literally hundreds of thousands of plastic fibers being released into our oceans.

It's not only washing our clothes that’s putting these plastic fibers into our environment, it can be as simple as wearing our clothes and fibers are falling off. A study was performed to calculate the number of plastic fibers that were released into our environment, an estimated number, of course, was that if the population was 100,000, people would produce around 1.02 kilograms of fibres each day, in a year that is 793 pounds of super small plastic shards. We, thankfully, don’t drink these plastic fibers, for we have high enough quality water filtration systems to extract the fibres, but for all the people out there who do not have access to clean drinking water they could be taking in hundreds or thousands of microfibers each day, the marine life ends up intaking the microfibers, and wildlife drinking this water that hasn’t been properly treated could die from malnourishment, from build-up of microfibres, if they ingest too much plastic (microplastics and plastic fibers).

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