Plastic or Planet
- AtharavRaj
- Aug 2, 2020
- 2 min read
Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay
Approximately, one million plastics bottles around the world are bought every minute. Plastics has various useful uses, we’ve been habituated to single usage of plastics — with serious environmental aftermath. Plastics Wastage is today so universal in the naturalistic environment that science scholars have even indicated, it could cater as a geological gauge of the age of Anthropocene.
From the era of 1950s to 1970s, only a few quantities of plastic were manufactured, so plastic wastage was almost controllable. In 1990s, generation of plastic waste had enlarged comparatively in former decades, subsequent analogous expansion in the production of plastic. In the 2000s, our production of plastic waste raised more in a decade than it’d in the former 40 years. At present, we’re producers of around 300 million tonnes of plastics waste, yearly. That is approximately parallel to the mass of the whole population of humans.
Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay
There’s an urgent call to slow the stream of plastics, but it’s the requirement of us, to ameliorate the way we control our plastic wastage, as today most of the it gets concluded in the environment.
Of all produced plastics waste, only 10% has been recycled. Around 11% has been burnt, while the rest 79% has been deposited in dumps, natural environment or landfills.
In a latest Global Survey, the stubs of Cigarette were found to be one of the most general form of plastic waste found in environment, as its filters comprise smaller fibers of plastic.
Image by 3D Animation Production Company from Pixabay
Most of us are daily users of drinking bottles, its caps, straws, stirrers, grocery bags and chips wrappers, even without contemplating on, where all these materials might get end-up. But, most probably, these gets ended-up in the rivers and those rivers transmit the plastic wastages from inland waterways to the oceans, making them prime contributors to the ocean pollution.
Particularly in India, River Indus, Brahmaputra, Meghna and Ganges carries 2,37,177 tonnes of plastic wastage that ends-up in oceans. If these present trends persist, then our oceans could be abode of more plastics than fishes, by 2050.
But fortunately, world is wakeful to the issues and the governments commenced actions on it by imposing levies or prohibiting specific plastic products. We have witnessed a lot of substantial actions, but the veracity is that, ‘We all requires to act more.’
We must broadcast to all and initiate indurated steps to vanquish over plastics pollution in our lives. And we did not need to wait for 5 June (i.e. World Environment Day) to take actions.
Comments