Single-Use Plastics Are Bad!

Plastic is a synthetic material made from many materials. Plastic was invented by Belgian-born American Leo Hendrik Baekeland in 1907. Since then, it has replaced a lot of materials because it is cheap, flexible, and easy to use.

However, some plastics contain harmful chemicals and can’t be used more than once, such as plastic water bottles and plastic bags.

These single-use plastics take a very long time to degrade and are usually dumped into the ocean to be eaten by birds, turtles, and fish. However, the single-use plastics make the animals: the birds, turtles, and fish sick and they die. Since we, as humans eat fish and some birds, the plastic gets transferred indirectly to our body systems as well. Along with this, Swedish scientists at the University of Uppsala recently demonstrated that larval Perch, a type of bird raised in waters containing micro-plastics “only ate plastic and ignored their natural food source of free-swimming zooplankton.”

Because plastic bags are blue like the sea, some sea creatures can’t sea them and swim right into them and suffocate. By 2050, there may be more plastic in the ocean than fish.

There is no problem with the plastic; plastic is one of the easiest and the most recycled items in the world. However, of all the 5-litre plastic water bottles in Maldives, only 3.8% of them (around 1 million bottles) have been intercepted and recycled since 2016.

So, it is good to recycle single use plastics instead of dumping them everywhere.

Source: https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2016/12/world/midway-plastic-island/