I recently watched a film called “A Plastic Ocean.” I can recall many times where
I have heard that there are insane amounts of plastic and garbage in the oceans
and I don’t think it ever dawned on me, maybe because it didn’t affect me or
because I never thought about it in such a more complex way. When I was living
in Florida there was one point I was working in a restaurant and we stopped
providing plastic straws and started providing paper straws per requests.
Everyone kept saying “We have to save the turtles.” “Look at those turtles with
plastic straws sticking out of their noses.” But that was the only time I
thought about it, I honestly didn’t know how much plastic and garbage flooded
our oceans. I never took some of the things this documentary stated into
consideration.
The
main thing that stuck out to me so much in this documentary was when they were
talking about how all this plastic affects our food chain. When there are
massive amounts of plastic in our oceans and the wildlife consumes this plastic
and then we consume these fish we are consuming the harmful toxins as well. When
they started showing the seabirds and how from birth these baby seabirds are eating
plastic. They show many studies about finding safe effective ways to see how
much plastic these birds and fish and other sea life and wildlife are eating.
There were birds dead on the beach and when collected and brought into the lab
their stomach were cut open and you were clearly able to see that there was no
room in this birds stomach for food because there was so much plastic. There is
proof that at least 90% of seabirds have consumed plastic at one point or
another. The most plastic that they have pulled out of a 90-day old chick was
276 pieces of plastic.
“Plastic
doesn’t break down, it breaks up.” This is one of those examples that I
mentioned above that I didn’t take into consideration. This documentary showed
a submarine go down about 5,300 feet deep where sunlight doesn’t even reach and
showed plastic bottles and plastic bags and other plastic things. I knew that
plastic never really decomposed, but I never thought about what really
happened. They showed you in this documentary that they were able to skim the
top of the ocean and collect tiny pieces of plastic, all different colors and
different sizes. In Hong Kong there was a shipment that crashed and there were
tiny plastic pellets all over the beaches and in the ocean. This was in Chi Ma
Wan and Sinopec is the company that distributed these plastic pellets. When they
showed these, I had no awareness that this has happened in another country.
They showed that Sinopec sent people to help clean up as best as they can, and
people from all over came out to help clean this up. One person stated, “It
looks like snow on the beach, that’s how many little white plastic pellets are
everywhere.” That made me speechless.
Sometimes I find myself much more
unaware of what is going on in other countries than I like to admit. When they
showed you on this documentary that villages are covered in garbage and slug
and plastic and it’s because in their area there is no landfill, there isn’t
any garbage services and it makes me take a step back. In some countries to
light fires to cook their food they were using plastic. Burning plastic in
general smells bad and burns your eyes, I can’t imagine cooking my food with
burning plastic. When igniting a fire, burning plastic was a lot cheaper than
buying gas or kerosene. In this documentary the families using plastic to
ignite their fires stated that they have gotten so use to it to the point where
it doesn’t bother them anymore.
There was something stated in this
documentary that has been stuck in my mind since I watched it. Towards the end
of the film journalist Craig Leeson made a comment that I found very
interesting. “Every other species does something to try and work towards the
benefits of the environment that they live in, but humans don’t.” I keep
replaying that repeatedly in my head to figure out if that’s a true statement
or an opinion.
I thought it was amazing that the film showed ways that we, as a
community can start making a difference on how much plastic is produced and how
to decompose of it in a healthy and safer way. They mentioned Bioremediation
which is “The use of natural organisms to break down hazardous substances into
less toxic or nontoxic substances.” I am so amazed by that, and one of the
reasons is because I feel like the world has become much more mature with
technology and we can keep finding new ways to help not only our oceans but our
planet.
Work Cited
Ruxton,
J. (Producer) Leipzig, A. (Producer) & Leeson, C. (Director). 2016. A
Plastic Ocean
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