Plastic Kills: Here Is Why (+Video)

6/15/2014
Updated:
6/26/2015

Ghost nets are abandoned fishing gear that become a trap to large marine life. Hundreds of thousands of  whales, dolphins, seals, sharks, mantle rays, turtles and other big sea creatures die each year.

You can help by buying products made of recycled fishing gear.

Bureo Skateboards just started producing decks made of recycled nets and have set up a recycling project in Chile.

Young London designer Auria creates modern swimwear out of Econyl, a recycled nylon thread produced by Aquafil USA who recycles both nets and carpets.

If you are an experienced scuba diver you can join others and retrieve ghost nets at an ocean near you.

Also check this 10 tips from Eco Watch to help stop plastic pollution.  Click here.

Plastic Invasion

Millions of tonnes of plastic refuse floats our oceans forever and harming countless lives.

Little do we think that eating a take-away could poison the very fish we intake.

The eternal shelf life of a plastic product is daunting. The Artic ice may trap a plastic bottle for a millennia.

And recently, off the shores of Hawaii, researchers have found a rock made of plastic. It has been given a new category: plastiglomerates.

Two things you can do to help minimize this pollution is to be best friends with your canvas tote bag and your canteen flask. Make some room for them, take them out with you and show them off. And you can also choose to buy products with biodegradable or no packaging.

Plastic Toxic Soup

Plastic garbage when exposed to sea water and sun light breaks down into smaller particles. These microplastics are known to absorb and magnify toxic waste by a million times.

Many brands use microbeads in their cosmetic products such as toothpaste and face cleansers. These are washed down the drain and are not filtered out by water treatment plants going straight to the oceans.

Microbeads are tiny plastic beads made of polythene (PE), polypropylene (PP), polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) and nylon. Some are invisible to the naked eye (smaller than 1mm) and they all are non biodegradable.

Marine life feed on micro plastics as they are mistaken for plankton which some species are unable to digest. As the surface of micro plastics attract harmful toxics such as PCBs and DDT, these poisons enter in the food chain.

Therefore when we eat fish or seafood we are also ingesting these toxic chemicals that may lead to cancer, infertility, attention deficit disorder (ADD) and other serious ailments.

NGO’s such as the Dutch The Plastic Soup Foundation and The North Sea Foundation have spearheaded an international campaign to ban the use of  microbeads called Beat The Microbead. This has resulted in many international brands starting phasing out production, albeit slowly.

You can help by buying alternative cosmetic products that use ground seeds and nuts or sea salt and/or not buying products that use microbeads.

For a full list of products and their brands who are still using microbeads in the USA, please click here.

I wish there was a happy ending, but at least now, we have no excuse to not do something about it.

Related Topics