Plastics in our oceans is the most dangerous form of pollution in the 21st century In Los Angeles alone, 10 metric tons of plastic fragments—like shopping bags, straws and soda bottles—are carried into the Pacific Ocean every day. Over the last ten years we have produced more plastic than during the whole of the last century. 50 percent of the plastic we use, we use just once and throw away. Enough plastic is thrown away each year to circle the earth four times.We currently recover only five percent of the plastics we produce.The average American throws away approximately 185 pounds of plastic per year.Plastic accounts for around 10 percent of the total waste we generate.The production of plastic uses around eight percent of the world's oil …show more content…
Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas struggles a lot with plastic pollution because its main income and food source is fishing. Plastic pollution hinders the amount of fish they gather and therefore slows down the rate of their income. Nassau is already a LIC and therefore plastic pollution causes famine there. They have already started to think about banning plastic bags. And if the plastic pollution rises then there will be losses of $8.5 million in tourist income annually for the country because of the pollution on the beach this happens in other countries as well. Some countries even bury plastic in the sand to keep tourists happy. This is terrible because it does not even biodegrade as well if it was in the ocean! However if other LDCs do the same as Nassau and ban single use plastics then this will cut plastic pollution by a huge percentage because even though LDCs do not have as much plastic they have no where to put it so it does not get recycled or get put somewhere where it will not go into the …show more content…
Of the 260 million tons of plastic the world produces each year, about 10 percent ends up in the Ocean, according to a Greenpeace report (Plastic Debris in the World’s Oceans, 2006). Seventy percent of the mass eventually sinks, damaging life on the seabed. The rest floats in open seas, often ending up in gyres, circular motion of currents, forming conglomerations of swirling plastic trash called garbage patches, or ultimately ending up washed ashore on someone’s beach. But the washed up or floating plastic pollution is a lot more than an eyesore or a choking and entanglement hazard for marine animals or birds. Once plastic debris enters the water, it becomes one of the most pervasive problems because of plastic’s properties: buoyancy, durability, propensity to absorb waterborne pollutants, its ability to get fragmented in microscopic pieces, and more importantly, its proven possibility to decompose, leaching toxic Bisphenol A (BPA) and other toxins in the