The Grim Future

Plastics are all around us. Almost every aspect of our lives is surrounded by a piece of plastic. Many of these plastics are reusable, but the ones that are single-use are bringing detrimental effects to our environment. Although there are many more laws in place and much more attention on the situation, the outlook for progress does not look promising right now.

In an article written by the UN, it is predicted that “Plastic pollution in oceans and other bodies of water continues to grow sharply and could more than double by 2030…” This is quite a grim idea meaning that there is so much that is trying to be done to clean not only the oceans, but the world. The organizations like Ocean Conservancy, 4Ocean, and the newly created organization Team Seas, are all working towards cleaning our oceans, but these organizations cannot solve the problem alone. There needs to be more done by governments and us as citizens to help make the world a better place.

As previously stated, the plastic pollution can rise by double or more in the oceans by 2030, less than 9 years. By 2040, the number of plastics in the ocean is predicted to be around 50kg of plastic per meter of coastline. In similar terms, this will be triple the amounts of plastics in the oceans now.

These plastics will cause a number of problems to the environment. Not only causing destruction of the sea life and corals, the toxins in the plastics will slowly seep into the waters, further killing the marine life. These toxins can also result in the corals bleaching themselves, and we could loose all natural reefs from this. There are many more problems than meets the eye though. In the same article released by UN, plastics are also a large contributor to greenhouse gases. In 2015, greenhouse gas emissions from plastics were 1.7 gigatonnes of CO2 and by 2050, the gas emissions are predicted to be 6.5 gigatonnes. So, not only will the plastics help to add to the breaking down of the ozone layer, they will also inadvertently help speed up the rates of climate change. Luckily, the article has been written right before COP26, and will hopefully bring attention to the problem for the governments.  Finally, the article also states that recycling on its own is not enough. To fully help create change, the plastic industry as a whole needs to be targeted and there needs to be a reduction of how much plastic is made overall.

The attended audience for this article is the everyday person. It was written to bring awareness to the problem and hopefully spark change in peoples hearts to push for less plastics and a better world. This article was written just before COP26, and was written to hopefully bring more awareness to governments about the plastic problem related with climate change. The article is obviously biased to making the world a less plastic lead economy and pushing people to help fight back against the plastic industries and make the world a cleaner place.