As I was browsing the web about the World's Largest Landfills, I came upon numerous results stating that the largest landfill is located in the Pacific Ocean called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. With the world producing over 200 billion pounds of trash per year, 10 percent of that ends up in the ocean. This statistic really caught my eye, obviously affecting the marine life in the oceans. Some areas in the worlds oceans are taken up by a 6 to 1 ratio plastic to plankton life. Some parts of our ocean system contains 46 thousand pieces of floating plastic per square mile. Seventy percent of the plastic floats to the bottom of the ocean floor, which will affect the plant and marine life in the ocean. About eighty percent of the plastic in the oceans comes from land. So that means that humans are freely letting the plastic get into the ocean ecosystem. If the trash is not coming from land, most of the other sources would be from private or commercial ships, fishing equipment, oil platforms and spilled shipping containers.
These statistics make me cringe, knowing that every day trash is adding up more and more. I think the way to change this problem is to let the public know. I think the media sometimes tries to hide these scary statistics from the public. If the world knew, I think it would better improve our society as a whole. People would take into consideration where and how to dispose trash.
These stats were very eye opening to me as well. I also found the picture to be pretty surreal also. The amount of waste our society produces is unbelievable, and these statistics clearly attest to that. I feel that the public is well informed on these issues, but simply oblivious to them. We simply ignore these startling statistics because we see ourselves as such a small piece to an enormous puzzle. I believe that many people feel that making changes to their personal waste disposal habits is a lost cause in some sense. However, if you spend enough time looking at the current methods in place, as well as where we are headed in the future at this rate; it is nearly impossible to continue being a part of the flawed system. If our society does not make significant strides in recycling, or develop more efficient methods of disposal in the near future, it is scary to think of how much permanent damage could be done to the ecosystem.
ReplyDeleteI remember when I first read about this it startled me as well. Another scary waste dump is the upper atmosphere. It is littered by about 300,000 pieces of space debris. Unless we keep our eye on that, it may turn into another ocean situation.
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