The plastic remains as it is for hundreds of years, so plastic garbage can stay in the environment for centuries. Everyday more than 1 million tons of plastic is produced in the world. After use a large portion of the plastic not collected and managed, due to carelessness and local inadequacy, ends up in the rivers, and then in the seas and oceans.
The floating plastic amasses in areas of the oceans, and at the same time it kills fish and marine animals who ingest them. In part, it shatters into microplastics and sinks to the bottom, choking marine life.
This is the visible part of it, but we must consider and add the nanoplastics, and microfibers that derive mainly from the filaments of artificial textile fibers of the clothes, released when they are washed.
Due to the ever increasing quantity of plastic produced, the weight of the garbage accumulating in the oceans will equal the weight of all the fishes in an unbelievably short time.
Often fishes, marine animals and birds eat plastic mistaking it for food. With the gut full of garbage they do not feel hungry and do not eat any more and soon they starve to death.
When we the humans eat fish, we eat also the plastic they contain. This is surely not a good thing, especially due to the additives and chemicals which are usually embedded in plastics.
Every day enormous quantities of plastic objects are used, and then thrown away. We are made to believe that they are very cheap so the “use and throw away” principle has spread out, to become the basis of the modern life. But actually the costs of the “after use” are devastating for the humanity. Only about 13% of the world plastic waste is managed and recycled. The rest ends up in the environment and in the seas, causing irreversible damages.
Images of the useless victims of the discarded , lost, or abandoned ghost nets, and of the rivers, beaches, sea bottom, flooded with plastic garbage are now ubiquitous in the mass media, and show the highly serious damages to the marine life, to tourism, fishing, navigation, to the environment and to ourselves human beings.
We can no longer sit back and watch all this tragedy happening under our eyes. We must engage and act with the aim to put and end to it.