why is plastic harmful to environment about 10 pages
Answers
1. Plastic is ubiquitous
Plastic debris is found absolutely everywhere, from the Arctic to Antarctica. It clogs street drains in our cities; it litters campgrounds and national parks, and is even piling up on Mount Everest (link). But thanks runoff, and to our fondness for directly dumping our trash into the nearest river or lake, plastic is growing increasingly common in the world’s oceans.
A crab on the beach of Henderson Island uses a piece of plastic debris as a home. When researchers traveled to the tiny, uninhabited island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, they were astonished to find an estimated 38 million pieces of trash washed up on the beaches.
Mountains of plastic trash have been found everywhere in the world’s oceans, from one of the remotest specks of dirt on the planet, Henderson Island, a tiny uninhabited coral atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean (ref), to the deepest spot on Earth, the Mariana Trench (ref), which plummets to a depth of 10,994 meters (36,070 feet) below sea level. As that flotilla of escaped rubber duckies demonstrated, floating plastic even forms massive “garbage patches” swirling slowly in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, thousands of kilometers away from land.
But more than floating around in the water column, plastic trash is found in the guts of more than 90% of the world’s sea birds (ref), in the stomachs of more than half of the world’s sea turtles (ref), and it’s even choking the life out of whales (ref). At the rate at which plastic is accumulating in the oceans of the planet, it’s predicted that, by 2050, the mass of plastic in the world’s oceans will exceed the mass of all the fish that live there (ref).
2. Plastics are one of the main products of fracking
We already know that fracking is bad for the planet -- it pollutes water, soil and air with toxins, it creates underground cavities that collapse into sinkholes, and it raises pressure in underground rock formations, destabilizing them and leading to earthquakes, even in places where earthquakes are uncommon. Adding insult to injury, one of the main products of fracking is ... plastics. Basically, fossil fuels removed from shale and other rock formations are turned into resin pellets that are used to manufacture ever more plastics, plastics that are easily discarded, plastics that usually are designed to be single use.
You may not know that plastics manufacturers are dangerous to the environment, to wildlife and to people in other ways, too. For example, the British chemical industry giant, Ineos, has 75 manufacturing facilities in 22 countries, including the United States. In addition to contributing to growing mountains of plastic rubbish, Ineos facilities can boast an impressive -- and growing -- record of fires, explosions, and chemical leaks.
“The Ineos facility in Cologne, Germany was the site of a massive fire in 2008, and there have been a series of high profile accidents elsewhere -- a major oil leak in Norway, a number of chemical leaks in France, long-running controversies over chemical dumping in Italy, and the release of toxic gas that resulted in the hospitalization of workers in Belgium,” according to a report (ref) written by Food and Water Watch and Food and Water Europe.