Plastic pollution-Distraction or emergency?
How did all that plastic get into the ocean? Is it really necessary to get so worried about plastic pollution?
Plastics, particularly disposable plastics, have revolutionized the lifestyle of modern people. Disposable plastics are used for producing plastic bags, food wrappers, and a range of other commodities. These creations made our lives easier and more convenient, they benefitted the human society. Yet, they posed a significant threat to the natural world.
In short, the plastic products that are tossed by humans end up in the ocean environment, and stays their for hundreds of years due to the difficulty of decomposing plastic products. The remaining of the plastic products in the natural marine environment has caused the Earth a range of problems.
However, did you ever wonder of how the plastic products managed to escape from our human hands all the way to the distant oceans and end up in the pacific garbage patch? It may seem to you that, with the perfectly organized waste management programs now present in major cities, it is impossible for the plastic products we toss to escape human control and go into the ocean. Unfortunately, there is in fact several ways that garbage, carefully handled and disposed, would end up in the ocean and out of where it is meant to be. Firstly, plastic products are light (consider empty plastic bottles or empty plastic wrappers), and that means they can be easily carried by the wind from a garbage bin on the street or an open garbage truck, to a water body nearby. Now, because of how the sea has a lower altitude than all other water bodies on Earth, those plastic products that enter adjacent rivers or streams are going to follow the flowing water and end up in the ocean. Secondly, coastal litters—garbage created on beaches or near-sea regions—can enter the ocean directly. Poor coastal waste management is not an uncommon thing. Thus, it is common for coastal litters to get created but not removed, leaving them to get washed away into the ocean. Thirdly, waste management systems are not perfect and will have leakages. For example, plastic products can get washed into nearby rivers or onto the coastline from a landfill. Then, those plastic products would get into the ocean. Lastly, there are places where wastes and sewages are released directly into nearby water bodies. These wastes often contain plastic products, and those product will follow the flow of the water body, as described above, to enter the ocean at a lower altitude.
Now, plastics have entered the ocean, and they are going to cause problems. A major harm of plastic products in oceans are the harm they cause on marine organisms. Plastics come in contact with a marine animal in three ways. It’s either that the marine animal safely swims past the piece plastic, the marine animal gets entangled in the piece of plastic, or that the marine animal ingests the piece of plastic. The best scenario we could hope for is for the marine animal to safely swim past the piece of plastic. However, marine animals can get very unlucky. Some marine animals get entangled in plastic rings or wrappers and fail to break the pliable materials. Getting entangled by a piece of plastic means to have the animal’s movement restricted—it can’t escape predators or chase prey, to have the animal’s respiratory tract squeezed—it can hardly breathe, or to have the animal’s digestive tract blocked—it can’t ingest any food. All of these situations eventually lead to death, or an especially difficult living. Marine animals can also ingest the plastic. It is easy for plastics to block the digestive tracts of marine animals, or to pierce through the animal’s body organs. Even if the plastic didn’t cause any immediate trouble in the animal’s body, the plastic may accumulate in the animal’s stomach, reducing the organism’s desire to eat, and leading to starvation—plastic is not food anyways.
Currently, people are still offering the issue of plastic pollution way more attention and efforts than it should receive. The two most popular approaches the human society has been implementing to prevent plastic pollution are banning plastic products in daily life and cleaning ocean plastic. People thought that by banning the use of plastics in daily life—bringing their own coffee cups, using paper straws, and making many other minor changes—would reduce the demand for plastics, thus reduce the amount of plastics produced and tossed. Changes are made, yet studies have shown that these changes didn’t make any large difference to an individual’s carbon foot print. The second approach people took to solve plastic pollution is by using machines to clean floating garbages in ocean patches. Yet, these machines, although receiving many attention, failed to make big changes due to how they fail to collect plastics frequently. Researchers conclude that the reason people and governments are so obsessed with solving the plastic pollution problem first is that, as can be seen above, both popular approaches to solving this issue does not require people to make large lifestyle changes. Changing your plastic straw into paper straws doesn’t require a big effort, and a machine that works thousands of miles away from you wouldn’t affect the way of your living. Yet, the solutions suggested for solving the climate crisis or other more urgent problems involve overcoming consumerism and major lifestyle changes such as prohibiting the eating of meat. These changes are way harder to make than those required for “solving” the plastic pollution. Thus, many governments pays great efforts to solving the plastic pollution, when in reality they are just distracting the crowd away from the problems that really matter but requires larger efforts to solve.
After we have talked so much about the harms and dangers associated with plastic pollution, do you feel like plastic pollution is an urgent problem that needs to get solved at all costs right now? Plastic pollution is an urgent problem, and it has to get solved at all costs. Yet, does plastic pollution have to get solved now? Is it worth for us humans to spend all of our precious time, resources, and research efforts on solving plastic pollution, other than focusing on some other environmental problems, that are possibly more urgent?
The concept of planetary boundaries has been introduced in 2009. Planet boundaries are a scale-like figure that compares the safe planetary boundary to current observations on 8 global problems that receive great attention. In other words, planetary boundaries compare the “severity” of 8 crisis that us humans got very worried about. These 8 crisis include: chemical pollution, climate crisis, ocean acidification, ozone depletion, nitrogen cycle, phosphorous cycle, freshwater use, deforestation, biodiversity loss, and particle pollution. Among these 8 topics, the problems of biodiversity loss, climate crisis and nitrogen cycle are the three in which the current state of the problem has exceeded the “safe boundary” the most, or in other words, the most severe and the most urgent. On the other hand, chemical pollution(plastic pollution), is among those problems that are the least urgent—our current status didn’t even pass the safe planetary boundary. This means that we humans, and the Earth, are perfectly safe if we just leave the problem of plastic pollution there.
In addition, it is not only plastic pollution that harms the ocean environment. The climate crisis also does.
The warming up of the Earth(the climate crisis) due to increased carbon concentrations in the atmosphere has a devastating consequence to ocean life. It is a natural phenomenon that when the ocean and the atmosphere comes in contact, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reacts with the waves of water to form carbonic acid in the ocean. However, now that there is more CO2 in the atmosphere during the climate crisis, more carbonic acid would end up in oceans. This sudden increase of acid concentration in the ocean will cause ocean acidification. Carbonic acid in the ocean will react with carbonate ions to form bio carbonate, a normal phenomenon, again. However, now that there is more carbonic acid in the ocean, more carbonate ions will be consumed. Unfortunately, carbonate ions are essential in the shell-building process for shell-building marine animals. Then, as less material is left for the shell-building marine animals to build their shells, the shells of these animals evolve to become thinner and more fragile. What’s worse is that the ocean water, which is becoming acidic, can easily dissolve the carbonate shells of the shell-building animals. A more acidic water that can more easily dissolve shells combined with a thinner shell that is easier to get dissolved means that shell-building marine animals will get way more vulnerable in the ocean environment than how they are in the past. (Part of this paragraph is paraphrased from the article in the second post of Earth Academy: “The carbon cycle – How is it changing? Does it matter anyways?” If you happened to be interested in the topic of carbon cycle, how it is changing, and how its change affects the world, then feel free to check out the fabulous course.)
Studies have shown that now, the negative impacts of climate change and ocean acidification has far surpassed the negative impacts of plastic pollution on the ocean environment. After all, the climate crisis is a global problem, one that is among the “most urgent” ones according to the planetary boundaries. People should consider to devote more time and effort into solving other global problems that are more urgent, including the climate crisis, rather than focusing on solving a less severe problem just for the lack of effort required to solve the problem.
In conclusion, this article introduced plastic pollution, what it is, how it happened, its harms to the natural environment, and if it is really necessary to continue spending such a large effort on the problem. In this article we also introduced the idea of putting some more efforts into the global problems that are more urgent, even if they require substantial lifestyle changes. So, dear reader in front of a screen or paper, are you prepared to make a change?
Citation:
Tomra. “How Does Plastic End up in the Ocean and What Can Be Done about It?” How Does Plastic End up in the Ocean and What Can Be Done?, TOMRA, 9 June 2021, https://newsroom.tomra.com/how-plastic-ends-up-in-ocean/#:~:text=Roughly%2020%25%20of%20plastic%20found%20in%20the%20ocean,the%20form%20of%20lost%20nets%2C%20floats%2C%20or%20lines.
Parker, Laura. “Plastic Pollution Facts and Information.” Environment, National Geographic, 3 May 2021, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/plastic-pollution.
Stafford, RIck, and Peter Jones Reader in Environmental Governance. “Climate Change: Obsession with Plastic Pollution Distracts Attention from Bigger Environmental Challenges.” The Conversation, 13 Sept. 2022, https://theconversation.com/climate-change-obsession-with-plastic-pollution-distracts-attention-from-bigger-environmental-challenges-111667.