By Dr. Mercola
While you may not directly feel the impact of garbage while going about your day to day life, it’s quite literally choking the life out of our ecosystem, and the situation is getting worse with each passing day.
Eventually, we will all suffer the very real consequences as the world dies around us. As stated in the featured documentary, Inside the Garbage of the World, “we’re going to create an environmental catastrophe that we may not be able to recover from.”
Many take for granted that their garbage “magically disappears” once it’s picked up by the garbage truck, but nothing could be further from the truth. Most garbage does not disappear. It’s simply relocated to a landfill or a recycling center. Trash also makes its way down storm drains and into nearby waterways.
The Abomination That Is Plastic…
Our throwaway mentality has created a pollution problem that now threatens the future of humanity itself. Plastic trash is of particular concern, as bits and pieces of plastic are mistaken for food by birds and sea animals.
Debris in the ocean also blocks sunlight from which plankton and algae sustain themselves, and this has negative implications on up the food chain as it eventually becomes micronized and winds up in some of the seafood you eat.
Also, once in the waterways, plastic particles also act like sponges for waterborne contaminants such as PCBs, pesticides like DDT, herbicides, PAHs, and other persistent organic pollutants.
This phenomenon makes plastics far from benign, and scientists have yet to determine the full extent of the dangers posed by their consumption, or the effects higher up the food chain-which is where you are.
Plastic pollution is an enormous problem, worldwide. According to the documentary, an estimated 4.7 million tons of plastic ends up in our oceans each year, where wave action turns them into a plastic soup that damages sea life and marine ecosystems.
Eighty percent of this plastic comes from land; the rest is litter from ships, boats, and industrial platforms.
Rivers and streams are equally affected by plastic trash. For example, as noted by Dan Glaser with the Surfrider Foundation, 30-75 percent of all pollution found in the Ventura River in California is plastic.
In Hawaii, there are remote beaches where you cannot even see the sand for all the plastic washed ashore. An estimated 17 tons of debris is collected on Kamilo Point and adjacent beaches each year.
Out of Sight, Out of Mind-Oceans Turning into Landfills
Plastics such as polycarbonate, polystyrene, and PETE sink to the bottom, where they smother and kill marine life on the ocean floor. Other plastics such as LDPE, HDPE, polypropylene and foamed plastics float.
Partially broken down plastic particulate also fills the water column between the ocean floor and the surface. The largest landfill in the world is in fact not located on land but in the Pacific Ocean, in the North Pacific Gyre. Ninety percent of the trash making upRead more…
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