Do You Want To Save the Sea?
Here Is Your Chance!
100 million marine animals die each year from plastic waste alone. 100,000 marine animals die from getting entangled in plastic yearly – this is just the creatures we find! 1 in 3 marine mammal species get found entangled in litter, 12-14,000 tons of plastic are ingested by North Pacific fish yearly.
Plastic waste makes up 80% of all marine pollution and around 8 to 10 million metric tons of plastic end up in the ocean each year. Research states that, by 2050, plastic will likely outweigh all fish in the sea. In the last ten years, we have produced more plastic products than in the previous century. The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) has stated that basically 100% of all plastics human beings have ever created are still in existence. Plastic generally takes between 500-1000 years to degrade. Even then, it becomes microplastics, without fully degrading.
Plastic pollution is a global problem. Approximately 7 billion of the 9.2 billion tonnes of plastic produced from 1950-2017 became plastic waste, ending up in landfills or dumped. Plastic pollution can alter habitats and natural processes, reducing ecosystems’ ability to adapt to climate change, directly affecting millions of people’s livelihoods, food production capabilities and social well-being. UNEP’s body of work demonstrates that the problem of plastic pollution doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The environmental, social, economic and health risks of plastics need to be assessed alongside other environmental stressors, like climate change, ecosystem degradation and resource use.