A nice cold drink of water in a plastic bottle wonāt hurt? You think it may not, but now read on and see what our irresponsible disposal of plastics does.
A simple plastic water bottle can take between 400 to 500 years to decompose in the marine environment. But wait, it doesnāt actually ever decompose completely. A plastic bottle will slowly fragment into smaller and smaller pieces. Eventually, it will end up as microscopic pieces that will still float around in our oceans.
There are currently approximately 51 trillion microscopic pieces of plastic in our oceans. Putting that into some sort of perspective that equates to 269,000 tons of plastic. Microplastics have even recently been discovered deep in the Arctic ice.
Think about this, we all love to go to the beach on a lovely summer day. What a better way to end our beautiful day with that British classic, fish, and chips from the local āchippieā. The beach where we went had some plastic on it. But that doesnāt affect us, we have our fish and chips.
Some of those 51 trillion microscopic pieces of plastic in the ocean have probably been ingested by the fish that we are eating. Ok clever clogs, you had a sausage and chips instead. Even if we donāt eat fish, or even go to the beach, all of us without doubt, breathe. 70% of the planet’s oxygen is produced by marine plants, so we need to take more care of it.
Every day approximately 8 million pieces of plastic pollution find their way into our oceans.