Humans are producing more than 300 million tons of plastic each year, half of which is for single-use items. Single-use plastic is present almost anywhere on earth, but does the abundance amount make them beneficial? Absolutely not. The government should ban single-use plastic because it can harm animals, harm humans, and contaminate the earth. The use of plastic, leading the world to catastrophe.
To start off, plastic can cause a lot of harm for animals. Most likely the marine animals. More than 100 million marine animals, such as mammals, sharks, turtles, and more are killed each year from plastic. An abundance amount of more than 1.1 million seabirds are being killed off. Since plastic can be broken into smaller pieces, it would be easier for the animals to consume them. More than 90% of all birds and fish have particles of plastic waste in their stomach. When animals see plastic floating on the surface of the ocean, they mistake it as their prey and consume them. They can also get tangled in plastic while fleeing from a predator. When they get tangled by plastic, it can damage their health, and can possibly make them perish. Getting wrapped or tangled will cause them to be unable to move. Furthermore, plastic will hinder them to survive when it is filled up in their bodies. they will become famished, suffocate, or even drown (due to the lack of air). Plastic is inedible, but the poor animals can’t avoid them, needing to experience such tragedy.
If plastic can harm animals, it surely will harm us, too. Fish are contained in meals that we eat, but if the fish ate the plastic, we will also swallow those nasty single-use plastics. Corresponding to absorbing nutrients from the fish, we’re also getting plastic from them. In the production of making single-use plastics, it releases dioxins, phthalates, vinyl chloride, ethylene dichloride, lead, and more toxic chemicals. These chemicals added to plastic can alter hormones or other potential human health effects. It’s likely that you will see plastic wrapped around your food as packaging, so it’s possible that the chemicals will get into the food we eat, which we can end up consuming. The presence of plastic makes huge damage to living species such as animals and humans is already hazardous, but there is still more to cover.
Some people might say, plastic bags can benefit us in some way. If we found possible replacements such as paper bags, it does not make anything better since it also creates pollution. However, from my perspective, plastic pollution exceeds the contamination paper bags bring to the environment, spreading from the water to land, then air. First, paper bags are biodegradable, meaning that they can be broken down. In contrast, single-use plastic is not. Plastic can release chemicals into the soil and spread into the roots of plants, then also seep into the water. In addition, 1.1-8.8 million tons of plastic enter the ocean each year. Plastic can also pollute the air, some people might burn the plastics to get rid of them, but igniting the plastic will release toxic gas such as dioxins or furans into the air. Which is one of the reasons why some countries have extremely bad air quality.
The absence of plastic will not make any disadvantage for our Earth. We, humans, can replace plastic with much more harmless materials to benefit our world. Plastic can harm animals, us, and the environment. Banning it can make the earth a much cleaner, secure, and enjoyable space we’d like to live in.
