Should Plastic Be Banned: Essay

Did you know that humans are dumping more than 8 million tons of plastic into our oceans every year? That's over 21,918 tons of plastic per day thrown into our ocean. Our Earth can’t hold all of the plastic we have thrown away, and we need to ban all single-use plastic. Since over 60 million plastic bottles are thrown away every day, plastic bottles need to be banned in all countries. Plastic is harming the health of animals and humans around the world, is destroying ecosystems, and the future costs will be astronomical.

Since 1907, when plastic was created, plastic has become a bigger and bigger problem for animals and human health. A study done by the University of Newcastle, Australia says that the average person could be consuming about 5 grams of plastic each week. Since 2000, the world has produced as much as all the years before that combined, a third of which has leaked into nature. The production of plastic has increased by 200% since 1950. As of 2016, 100 million metric tons of plastic waste have ended up in the ocean. 75% of all plastic produced is waste because it is single-use and disposable. Plastic waste is often majorly mismanaged, and plastic is left uncollected, openly dumped, littered, or managed through uncontrolled landfills. Of the mismanaged waste about 87% of it is leaked into nature and becomes pollution. If we don’t do something, the ocean will contain one metric ton of plastic for every three metric tons of fish by 2025.

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Additionally, some studies have shown that microplastics in the air can cause mild inflammation in the respiratory tract. In marine animals, higher levels of microplastics in the digestive and respiratory systems can lead to early death. Studies have found toxicity in lung cells, liver, and brain cells from microplastics. Some types of plastic have chemicals and additives that are potentially harmful to humans. Identified health risks due to the production of residues, additives, dyes, and pigments found in plastic, have been found to have an influence on sexual function, fertility, and increased possibility of mutations and cancers. Airborne microplastics can also carry pollutants from urban areas. There are many direct effects of plastic on animal health including entanglement, blockages to the digestive system, and poison impacts. for humans, the effects depend on size, chemical composition, and shape all of which help decide if the particle will be removed or taken into the cells and possibly moved. The indirect effects of microplastics on the environment and human health are hard to determine. Most of the studies are done in the marine environment and it is clear that microplastics interact with every part of ecosystems in many ways, a lot unknown. There may be large ecological risks associated with plastic pollution, including the health of fish stocks and changing marine carbon storage, which could have long-term effects on food and climate security. The impact of plastic debris on one individual animal is widely known but the result of plastic on the entire species population is harder to determine. A review commissioned by the Scientific Technical and Advisory Panel of the GEF, in collaboration with the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, said that 663 have been reported being tangled up, or eaten plastic trash, an increase of 40% in the number of species since the last study. Plastic trash was responsible for 88% of recorded events, and 15% of species were on the IUCN red list. More concerning were the critically endangered Hawaiian monk seal, endangered loggerhead turtle, vulnerable northern fur seal, and vulnerable white-chinned petrel.

In addition to harming animal and human health, plastic waste is destroying the delicate balance of ecosystems. Plastic pollution can cause irreversible changes to ecosystems' performance at the faunal-province [regional] level or the extinction of a species or rare habitat. A high hazard can cause mortality for an affected species or significant changes in the function of an ecosystem and animals. Effects would be expected to occur at the level of a single coastal or oceanic body and would be felt for a prolonged period after the culture activities stop (greater than the period in which the new species was cultured or three generations of the wild species whichever is the lesser time period). Changes would not be amenable to control or mitigation. Moderate hazards would change the ecosystem performance or species performance at a regional or sub-population level, but plastic would not be expected to affect whole ecosystems. Changes associated with these risks would be reversible and have moderately protracted consequences. Changes may be amenable to control or mitigation at a significant cost or their effects may be temporary. Low-hazard changes are expected to affect the environment and species at a local level but would be expected to have a negligible effect at the regional or ecosystem scale.

Plastic may be one of the least expensive materials right now, but in 30 years cleaning up the trash we have made costs will be through the roof. A University of California, Berkeley study estimated that the areas of Los Angeles and San Francisco could gain an economic benefit of $200 a ton for recycling instead of dumping their plastics. Even so the cost of recycling a bottle versus making a new one simply varies, depending on where the bottle is and what the changing price of oil happens to be. That is just two cities out of around 5,000 with a population above 150,000. NAPCOR estimates that 5.5 billion pounds of PET bottles and jars passed over U.S. shelves in 2006. Making this many PET bottles and jars today from virgin plastic would cost $4.5 billion just for the raw materials, without considering the cost of operating bottle production plants. The number of plastic bottles passing over the shelves has only increased leading to more expensive production. Prior to plastics reincarnation as industrial carpet or sleeping bag stuffing, a plastic bottle in the recycle bin has a long journey ahead of it. First, it goes to a collection facility to be inspected for contaminants like rock or glass. Then it is washed and chopped into flakes. The flakes are dried and melted into plastic lava, which is filtered for impurities and formed into strands. Finally, the strands are cooled in water and chopped into pellets that can go to the market. Landfills, however, are the final resting place for most bottles. Seemingly this is the cheaper option. But landfill tipping fees, the dumping tariffs levied to offset the cost of creating, maintaining, and closing a landfill, can be quite expensive compared to recycling. This is especially true in densely populated areas like the East Coast or areas like Florida with shallow water tables. In fact, fees can run from $10 a ton to over $100, according to Jerry Powell, editor of the trade publication 'Plastics Recycling Update.' Additionally, dumping wastes is a valuable commodity: In 2005, about half a billion dollars worth of PET bottles went to landfills, according to the Container Recycling Institute, a non-profit organization. Rising plastic prices have forced some companies that bottle their product, like Coca-Cola, to think twice about using expensive virgin plastic resin. Now they are working to make more lightweight bottles that contain more recycled resin, Powell explained. Bottles made with thinner plastic use 30 percent less resin and rely on the water or liquid inside to maintain their shape. Using less resin per bottle could translate to savings on raw materials of about $1.5 billion a year for the bottling industry. Powell thinks it’s a positive step for the business and the environment. “That’s what we need,” he remarked. “Less plastic. Not just recycling.”

According to the Container Recycling Institute, 100.7 billion plastic beverage bottles were sold in the U.S. in 2014, or 315 bottles per person, and all territories should ban plastic bottles for good. The health of animals has been deteriorating for years because of plastic, their ecosystems have been dying as well, and the costs of plastics previously used are going to start skyrocketing to prevent more plastic trash. We may think that plastic is helping our interests currently but, the longer we wait to pick up after ourselves the more toxic the waste will become and will start to threaten everything we know and love. Start picking up after everyone around you.