How Does Plastics Seriously Affect the Environment?
Matthew Jeong
March 2024 — BiologyWhile we live through our lives, we always need daily supplies. Many of the daily supplies are made of plastics, and they are frequently used by us which causes negative impact to the environment and right back to us. I believe that all of us should try to use less amount of plastic, and I'm about to show what happens if we ignore this.
To start, the main reason why plastics should be used less is because they take so much time to break down (hundreds of years), and us humans want to burn or bury these million tons of plastics to provide more space. But if we bury them the soil and underground water will get poisoned. If we burn them it will create air pollution which causes direct damage to us. Even if plastic breaks down there will still be some micro-sized plastics that have sizes of a cell or smaller. These particles are found in our drinking water and also the air that we breathe.
There are two main places where plastic will damage the natural environment: oceans and forests. Starting with the oceans, if the plastic waste goes to the water, many of the animals will think of those plastics as their food and will eat them. Those plastics will get stuck to them and kill them. Already, many of the oceans are polluted by plastics, and people will need that ocean for resources, but if those oceans are dying, the resources will be gone soon. The other part of the natural environment is land. Land animals will also get negative effects like the sea animals do. They’ll not only get directly affected by the plastic but also indirectly as some of them consume aquatic animals.
The process of making plastic also harms the environment because many chemicals are combined and trees are also needed to make plastics. For example, in some oceans, the water surface is almost covered with plastic trash and these will also cause global warming. It’s breaking down lots of habitat like where polar bears live. The big glaciers are melting down which makes people predict that polar bears will soon be extinct.
Another example of it is coral reef which is home for about 1,500 species of fish. The corals are dying because of water pollution and mainly because of the rapid rise of temperature.
Us humans are using plastics for convenience but not thinking about the natural environment. The problem is that more plastics are being produced these days as time is passing. All of these plastics are leaking out to the oceans.
If all of these natural environments die out, humans will also not have a source of food and other necessities..
To stop this problem of plastics outflowing to the oceans, I think we should make more garbage collecting systems in developing countries like many African and Asian nations because those countries have no systems that regulate plastics being thrown to the ocean.
In conclusion, it is true that the Earth is dying and it’s in danger because of plastics. I wanted to let you know how these plastics affect our ocean and land environments which impacts us. As a solution we must collect the plastic wastes that are around the world, and we should reduce the use of plastics.
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