Next week is World Ocean’s Day and it has just been revealed that 9 out of 24 whales found dead in the Mediterranean in recent years had all died because they had swallowed plastic. Our plastic. Scientists even discovered an astounding 29 kilos of plastic in the stomach of a single sperm whale, which was washed up on the Southern coast of Spain.
During the examination of the ten-metre-long male whale, experts found many plastic bags, a jerry can and several pieces of rope and net. In the Greek island of Mykonos, one young whale swallowed more than a hundred items of plastic, including bags that were proved to have drifted with the currents from over 500 miles away from the city of Thessaloniki.
Do you know where your plastic bags end up?
In 1975, the National Academy of Sciences estimated that 14 billion pounds of plastic garbage was dumped into the ocean every year. A more recent study undertaken by the World Economic Forum, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and McKinsey and Company showed the scale of the breakdown in the global plastic system. A full 32% of the 78 million tons of plastic packaging produced annually is left to flow into our oceans; the equivalent of pouring one garbage truck of plastic into the ocean every minute! A whole 91% of pur plastic production does not get recycled. That means only 9% gets recycled. That is very little.
If we carry on as usual, this is expected to increase to two garbage trucks full of plastic dumped into the ocean per minute by 2030 and four per minute by 2050. By 2050, this will mean there will be more plastic than fish in the world’s oceans.
So what could you do to help?
Recycle. Don’t accept straws in restaurants and always bring a reusable bag when you go shopping. Also, support all these great charities out there fighting plastic pollution, like The Whale Company, who recently came to talk to our school.
On World Ocean’s Day, 8th June 2018, Carlos and Carolyn from the Whale Company will begin their journey along the Thames River from the navigable source at Lechlade to the sea at Gravesend. They will paddle 300km on their SUPs (Stand Up Paddle Boards) made out of plastic bottles to raise awareness of plastic pollution in our waterways and to deliver a ‘Message in a Bottle’ to parliament. We wish them great luck and will all be supporting their great campaign to change how our nation uses plastic, so that no more whales or other animals have to die.
By Danni