Have you ever wondered what happens to that plastic bottle or plastic bag that you throw away? What if I told you that the bag and the bottle are slowly killing off marine life and slowly turning our oceans into dumps? This is the case and the problem is only growing and everybody is responsible for it and everybody needs to pitch in and clean up this mess. We all use plastic because it’s convenient for us, but in the end it ends up killing the marine life, so maybe it’s not that convenient. While many people may say there isn’t a problem with plastic in the oceans, their dead wrong. According to scientists about 80% of the plastic in the ocean comes from land sources meaning that we need to figure out a way to stop it from entering ("Ocean Plastic." Ocean Plastic. Seeturtles). Every year we make about 260 million tons of plastic each year and only about one percent of that is recycled which means more plastic that can get into the oceans (DiGregorio, Barry E. "Tracking Plastic in the Oceans." EARTH Magazine). We don’t need all of this plastic because almost a third of it goes to one time use products. While using these products are nice and easy, they are causing a major problem in which we might end up with a giant floating landfill. If more people don’t start to realize that we have a problem with our oceans and plastic, instead of going to the beach you could end up taking your next vacation to a landfill.
In the past couple of year pollution in our oceans have been increasing, but people still seem to push the problem under the rug and if we continue to do this we are going to have a bigger problem than we already have. Therefore in order to reduce this problem and try to stop it we need to start holding people accountable. This means holding recycling companies accountable for how they handle their trash and if they don’t follow orders they should receive strict penalties until they follow them. Recycling